A New Decade

I was hoping to achieve more in my two months back home in New York but most of my time was spent with my elderly parents, which was really the entire point of the journey. I feel more spiritually refreshed although I am now on crutches due to an operation to remove another hopefully benign soft tissue tumour from my knee. I'm on a combo of diclofenac, paracetamol and codiene for the pain and I cannot take my Zonisamide at the moment because it is so sedating I cannot navigate on the crutches!

I managed to write one short story "Kinesis" and start a new installment of Catticus which has a far more comic turn than the last one. When I was in New York I joined Amnesty International's Women's Human Rights Action Team which started to meet up for a book club before I left, the book of the month was "Half the Sky" written by Pulitzer Prize winning human rights jounalists Nicholas D. Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn. It tells the story of women who have endured some of the worst abuses and conditions on the planet, how they perservered and managed to overcome their oppressors and the hard struggle to survive, even for those who have managed to beat the odds. The story of the women of the untouchable Dalit village reminded me of the vigilante Gulabi Gang, who I heard about on the BBC website;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7068875.stm

This has inspired me to start a screenplay about their story and I hope I can do it justice.

Tonight I'm going to finish reading this book and I also have another project in the pipeline, an online magazine called Tokyo Cyberpunk Quarterly. Submissions are welcome, please email short stories or poetry to tokyocyberpunk@rocketmail.com