Swami Venkat

StoryGap

For anyone with a book they keep meaning to write. It lays the whole book out, finds the gaps between chapters, and helps fill them in.

storygap.ai ↗

Chapter Two

Finding Your Voice

Your voice is not something you find. It is something you uncover, under the sentences you borrowed before you knew you were borrowing them.

Most writers spend their early pages imitating someone else: a favorite author, a mentor, a style admired from a distance. Imitation is how the ear learns. The discomfort of imitation is not failure. It is the sound of a voice being born.

I spent three years writing like a man I had read at nineteen. His rhythms were not mine. His subjects were not mine. But his confidence was intoxicating, and I wore it the way a child wears a parent’s coat, sleeves dragging.

so she wrote it down on the back of a receipt, and then on the next one, and by the time the bus reached her stop she had a page.

It was not a good page. It did not need to be. It was the first one in years that had not been written for someone else to approve of, and she read it twice on the walk home, out loud, to no one.

That night she did not stare at the blank screen. She typed the receipt in, word for word, and kept going until the radiator ticked off and the street went quiet.

In the morning there were eleven pages. Most of them she would cut. One sentence she would keep for the rest of the book.

Nothing in the room had changed. The desk was the same desk, the lamp the same lamp, the cursor still blinking where it had blinked for a hundred nights.

What had changed was smaller than that. She had stopped waiting for the book to arrive whole. She had a thread now, and a thread was enough to pull.

Later, people would ask her where the idea came from, and she would tell them about the bus, and the woman with the shopping bags, and the sentence. She would leave out the hundred nights. They were the part that mattered.

CONTENTS

1The Spark9

2Finding Your Voice23

3The First Draft41

4Revisions66

5Letting Go88

vii

Chapter One

The Spark

Maya stared at the blank page for the hundredth night. She had a desk, a lamp, a year of savings and no book at all, only the certainty that there was one somewhere, waiting for her to stop being afraid of it.

The sentence that cracked it open was not hers. A woman on the night bus, shopping bags at her feet, said into her phone: “I didn’t leave. I just stopped arriving.”

Maya did not have a pen,

The Art of
StartingJANE DOE

For everyone with a book
they keep meaning to write.— J. D.

The Art of
StartingJANE DOE

Turns a phone into an instrument. Tilt to play, and it only sounds the notes of the raga, so it always sounds beautiful, even if you've never played. Coming to iOS and Android.

ragaphone.com

Demo

9:41▂▄▆ ◠ ▭

HANSADHWANI

SaReGaPaNiSa

Piano⏻C

Its cousin, Ragaboard. Pick a raga and play it in your browser.

The fastest way to get a thought out of your head. Tap and talk, and it's jotted. Every day is a page, tags collect related ideas, "remind me Friday" sets the reminder, and it all flows into QTR.

9:41▂▄▆ ◠ ▭

Sundaysunday, 4 october · 4 notes

⌕···

6:12 pm

Kerala, just before the rain. Print this one for the hallway.

photos

11:02 am

Stop being yourselfswamiphoto.substack.com

writing

9:30 am

1:08

Chorus for the bhajan: try it a half step lower, in G…

music

Yesterdaymonday, 5 october · 4 notes

⌕···

9:24 pm

What if the weekly review was a walk instead of a meeting? Phones away, one question each, back by ten.

ideas

7:30 am

Morning pages: the planning doc is too long. Cut it to what we will actually decide.

writing

6:40 pm

~~Pick up the bread on the way home.~~

home/errands

Todaytuesday, 6 october · 5 notes

⌕···

9:38 am in 3d

Remind me Friday at 9 to send Priya the final offsite agenda.

work/offsite

8:47 am

Journey map from the planning wall. Keep the three columns, drop the swimlanes.

work/offsite

8:15 am

0:42

Idea for the offsite: start the morning with a walk by the water…

ideas

7:50 am

The case for slow softwarecraigmod.com

reading

9:41▂▄▆ ◠ ▭

Todaytuesday, 6 october · 3 notes

⌕···

9:52 am

Call the venue about the headcount for Friday.

9:38 am in 3d

Remind me Friday at 9 to send Priya the final offsite agenda.

work/offsite

9:20 am

A field guide to offsitesbasecamp.com

work/offsite

9:05 am

Walk route for the offsite morning: the bridge at seven, back by nine.

work/offsite

tag this note

work/offsiteideasreadinghome/errandshealthpresentationplanningreminderagendafamilygrocerieshiringmeetingsrunningsoftwarevenue

# search or add a tag

Lyrics, pitches and ragas for every Sai bhajan. Sing any bhajan and it finds your pitch, recognises the song and tells you its raga. Playlists to share with your bhajan group.

saibhajans.com

Sai Bhajans☰

Find your pitch

Sing any bhajan. I'll find your pitch, recognise the song, and tell you its raga.

Tap to start listening

Singing in Hindi ⌄

Sai BhajansListening 0:12

You're singing in G · 5 Pancham

Keep going. A few more lines makes me more sure.

WHAT I HEARprema mudita mana se kahorama rama ramshri rama rama ram

■ I'm done singing

Shruti×

G5 PanchamDrone playing

C1C#1½D2D#2½E3F4F#4½G5G#5½A6A#6½B7

Pancham Sa PaMadhyam Sa Ma

shishya · the course

शिष्यSHISHYA

AI turns five years of my Zoom piano lessons into a course I can search.

A course outline built from all of my lessons
Mistakes I kept making, recognized as patterns
How I progressed on each song, from the first time I played it to the last
Answers to every question I asked my teacher

Five years of weekly piano lessons on Zoom, around 250 hours. Every lesson transcribed and chaptered; type "half beat" and land on the ninety seconds where it was explained.