Relaunching My Substack With Focus on Books

It's time to share something that makes more sense to me now, six months later.

I had started my substack six months back. The focus of my articles was different then. But as time moved on, things in my headspace started falling differently. Falling, as in organising themselves and telling me in the proverbial ‘inner voice’ that this was the path for me now.

I heeded that call and deleted everything on my previous substack and renamed the substack ‘Book Mojo’. The name and theme of this substack are self-explanatory.

As expressed on my Welcome Page, I intend to discuss the world of books that have been a defining part of my life since childhood.

Books give wings to your imagination,
Authors share with you their creation.
When your stressful world is a gaping hole,
Open a good book to take a nourishing stroll.

~ @bylineraza 

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When I thought about Substack and how I would like to use it now, I remembered something from my childhood. As a young 11-year-old in the early 1980s, I would frequent the local library that was at some distance from our house. I would take my bicycle and ride a couple of kilometres during the late afternoon to check out the books that were still there on the library bookshelves.

I would look for the Mallory Towers book series, the Magic Faraway Tree books, Enid Blyton books, Secret Sevens, Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drews that made up my reading world at the time. We had recently purchased a colour television, but the only TV shows that I watched were the ones that were broadcast on Sunday. The weekdays mostly revolved around going to school, coming back home, doing homework, playing badminton on the lawns, riding the swing there and then saying a happy hello to my library books.

Novels got ignored in college life

When college happened, then extracurricular activities and friendships happened. My loyal companions in the form of books got ignored. Though sometimes I would pick up a novel and enjoy the story, but it was not a regular feature. Music, girls, career started taking up my headspace, while fiction books got filed into some forgotten drawer.

University days were followed by jobs, office work and the lure of money that brought new experiences in my life. But the common element that continued to serve as a connecting link to all jobs that I worked in was writing.

Since I have been quite a reader since my school days, so words have constantly guided my life choices later. I like being surrounded by words, whether they are in books, in newspaper & magazine articles, in blogs, on website articles or even in email newsletters.

I worked in jobs where I had to edit words, use words to write articles, listen to words and transcribe them, or even translate words into a different language. At times, I also had to be creative with words while working on social media posts or image creatives to go with them.

The inner voice became louder

Over two decades of professionally working with words, my inner voice could stand it no more. What I had begun to observe was that my natural inclination to read and then write for the sake of writing had waned.

In other words, my book mojo had gone. Mojo, as you know, is about 3 Es - Energy, Enthusiasm, Excitement. As I worked professionally with words, I lost my mojo for books. I didn’t even feel like writing or reading much, which had really become mechanical in nature. I did the writing part just because I was getting paid to do it. As for reading, I kept postponing it for a better time. Movies in halls and multiplexes, TV shows and then the new OTT web series avatar on Netflix and Prime Video got me my dopamine fix. Books were nowhere in the picture.

Then the phenomenon of Harry Potter happened. I got back into fiction and novels and book reading again. As I watched the Harry Potter films - they were good - but the constant refrain that kept ticking in my mind was “The book is better”.

During my university days and working in regular jobs, I also got interested in non-fiction, specifically self-help books. I started reading them as I sought to become an improved version of myself. Maybe I lacked something inside, or I could become so much better and stronger mentally and emotionally - the self-help books made a mark on me.

Called to edit books

Three years back, a friend of mine contacted me and said that he was writing a book on the history of his university. I, too, had studied at the same university. He gave me the manuscript and asked me to proofread it. I started the work and after many sittings with the author, we finished editing the manuscript. It became a two-volume book.

The friend then recommended my name to others in his network who were close to publishing their first book. The authors got in touch with me and I ended up editing and proofreading six books - all non-fiction.

Moving forward

What I am trying to convey is that now I have that mental space where I am happy to write. I feel a sense of contentment and peace whenever I write something and publish online. I feel as if I am doing some meaningful work, not the disinterested writing that I was doing earlier just for the sake of getting the monthly salary or payment for my writing services.

What you can expect on ‘Book Mojo’ are writings and audio podcast episodes on everything to do with books that I feel like sharing. Hopefully, you will get some value out of what I share and use it to make your own life more meaningful, purposeful and peaceful.

~ @bylineraza