An obligatory first post as a novelist

Contrary to the popular belief about how lazy of a person I am, I have been making a to-do list since pretty much forever (if you consider a year as forever). And like most to-do lists, I cross the stuff that I managed to finally finish. Among the pile of stuff that I had written on that to-do list (and believe me, calling it a pile of stuff is an understatement), finally I can cross off one entry that has been sitting there forever. 

And no, I don't think I'll be able to cross off the first entry, EVER.

So yeah, for some of you people who decided to actually make your followers-to-following-ratio look worse by following me on Instagram and Twitter, you guys might actually know that I can now call myself a novelist (albeit a half one). If you had told me two years ago right before I started writing that I would be a novelist, I would have rammed your head into a fucking wall and dialed a mental hospital to pick you up. But here I am, alive and more novelist than anything else. 

First of all, allow me to say my gratitude (feel free to ignore this paragraph). I thank Debbie for believing in my writing skills (albeit it was mediocre to say the least). Despite being born and raised in two different circumstances, I find tons of similarities between her and myself that I can safely call her my doppelganger. Debbie is an amazing writer and an amazing person (doesn't this mean that I am also an amazing person?) and although she rarely blogs, you can check out her writings at debbiewidjaja.tumblr.com. Why she uses Tumblr as her blog still remains to be one of my life's biggest question.

Picture courtesy of @abcditto, whom I used this picture of without permission, I'm sure he won't mind

If you read Meter per Second from the front, you will get a girl's point of view and if you read it from behind, you will read from a guy's point of view. I wrote it together with Debbie (who had actually published three novels before this one) and thanks to my inferiority complex, I actually felt inferior (duh). Doing something for the first time sucks. And unlike blogging --of which you guys can just press "close tab" if you feel that watching a video buffering is more fun than reading my blog-- people had to buy the novel in order to read it and by God I was scared. I was scared that people wouldn't like my writing, and it occurred countless times to me to just stop writing and curl in the corner of my room.

So a few months before Meter per Second was released, way back when I was still writing it, I told someone close to me that I was currently writing a novel and that it was a romantic/comedy teenlit. To which I blatantly admitted that I wished to write something heavier, like a detective story or a dystopic world. Moreover, I told her that I wasn't comfortable with writing in Bahasa despite having been using the language for 21 years. And I told her about my fear of people not liking the novel because of my writing. To which she casually responded with "Everything else does not matter, what matters is the fact that you tried and you started." And although I no longer am close to her, her words ring every time I doubt my own writing. 

As this is my first novel (unlike Debbie), I'm sure that my writing is somewhat inferior compared to hers. But that does not discourage me from improving and writing even more. Therefore, for any of you who had bought Meter per Second, I deeply apologize if it doesn't please you and I humbly ask you to help me improve by tweeting me if there is anything that you think needs to be changed from the way I write.

With that said, we (I and Debbie) decided to hold a giveaway for Meter per Second, click here for more details!