Two Weeks Off
Read time: 3 mins
Hello to all the one hundred and forty-one people who have subscribed to my newsletter!
It is a pleasure to be writing for all of you and I keep an eye on the stats of each post for my own validation😅. As you all know, I’ve been writing every week since I started writing on Substack back in October. Some of the stories were old and repurposed for this platform and some of them were brand new, but each of them had to be painstakingly written and edited by me. I’ve been fighting through mild burnout and writer’s block for more than a month now and my last short story - Space Oddity was a small temporary victory over my writer’s block but it still lingered around.
So, I decided to take a week off work and travel to Bengaluru. If you follow me on Instagram, I’m sure you saw glimpses of the little vacation I had. But what was more satisfying to me was that I finished two books! One was Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami and the other was The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.
If you guys remember, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami was on my list of books to read in my New Year’s Post Twenty Twenty One. Like all Murakami books, this one was beautifully sad and riveting! Also, every time I read a Murakami, I am left in awe about his knowledge of obscure (to me) classical instrumental music players like Strauss, Wagner, Chopin, Liszt, etc! Thanks to this book, I’ve added more compositions to my Classics & Instrumental Spotify playlist. The best feeling was when I finished this Murakami book in two and a half days straight! It took me back to my school and college days where I could polish off massive books in days. Ah! Good ol’ days!
The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel is a very good book too. I started it late last year and finally got the time to finish it off in Bengaluru. There is no investment advice per se, but it’s more of an explanation of the human psyche when it comes to finance and investments. If you’re into these things, it’s a must-read!
Inevitably, reading and relaxing in Bengaluru and the fact that I had to return to a ton of work made me skip writing for the past couple of weeks. That made me feel a little guilty and I’m currently planning a longer episodic story which I will start next week! So stay tuned for that!
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Thank you again for being an ardent follower of my stories and I hope you’ll be looking forward to my next story!
So long! 👋
- Darshan Pania