harshbhasin

I just published my first kindle short story: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RA3UD20

Also, related link on writing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793024

Thanks for your appreciation guys. I've written programming books so writing a story would be easy I thought. Creative writing is similar to programing I told myself. Writing has grammar, software has syntax; writers plot their stories, we engineers create architecture diagrams. But there are important differences as I found out. We engineers are proud of our knowledge software patterns but writers snub their nose at word-patterns, calling them clichés. Why, George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" shook my belief system to the very core! The pinnacle of our skill set is our ability to abstract objects, and the highest animal in our food chain, the software architect is paid big bucks because he can make "John" a "Man". Our abstract objects are like the Platonic archetypes: if there is John, then there is an archetypal form of John called "Man" up there in the sky. But writers snub their noses at abstractions. We want to know about John, not "Man" they say; show & tell, they say; be concrete and not abstract, they say.

These writers, these omnipotent, omnipresent gods, are in the minds of all their characters at the same time. Natural laws do not bind them: John can slip from the past to the present tense whenever he likes; but for an engineer if a font is out of place, or if he uses a hex code not specified in the style guide, the wrath of the QA department is upon him. We are the ants, the workers, the technicians forever bound to technical specs, UX and style guides. Writers have the magical "voice," which their characters echo. The closest we poor engineers can get to articulating a "voice" is through a spirited /debug comment/ which is an inadequate substitute because, mindful of the peer review, we dare not be too spirited in our comments.

Published! Submissions Manager is a Mac Application used by some very accomplished authors, poets and artists in creating and managing of their own works. It's built by the creators of http://www.MyStacki.com.

These three works have influenced me. These are writings of very creative people and I read them to understand their creative process.

1. Nikola Tesla's autobiography:

http://www.mystacki.com/#!/binder/35/nikola-tesla%27s-autobi...

2. Swami Vivekananda's complete works: http://www.mystacki.com/#!/binder/45/swami-vivakananda

3. David Bohm on creativity: http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Routledge-Classics-David-Bo...

I have been reading these three authors for many years, over and over again. In his autobiography, Tesla brings forth many exciting things about his creative process. He could prototype complete machines in his mind before building them. In his mind he could run tests, even see scars and blemishes on his machines. In my coding, I (feebly) try to emulate his method by trying to visualize my coding prototype in my mind. His short autobiography reads like that of a mystic. In there he describes how the idea of AC current came to him, while taking a walk and looking into the Sun. Philosophically, everything in life alternates: the pairs of opposites, ebb and flow-- its seems to be the code of life; and AC current does the same, it alternates. His writings on Electricity are against the established grain: for him electricity (his only love) is the current of life. There cannot be two electricities(positive and negative,) he says, these are only terms for the state of having more or less of the same thing.

David Bohm has important things to say about the creative process. He talks about completeness (wholeness) of thought. He talks about "mental models" that we create to understand reality and how we keep growing out of older models... newtonian physics gives way to relativity etc.

Swami Vivekananda was a contemporary of Tesla and they did actually meet. He was a scholar of the Indian philosophy system called Advaita and Sankhya. As Jung has said about archetypes -- same thoughts occur to people of all ages, the Sankhya philosophy system believed in the equivalence of matter and energy. Vivekananda introduced these ideas to Tesla and expected him to prove them. But the proof came ten years later with Einstein. I have written about this here: http://www.mystacki.com/#!/post/132/vivakanand's-meeting-wit...

John Dobson (, the creator of the dobsonian telescope) in a very interesting interview on "Tonights show" says as follows:

http://www.mystacki.com/#!/post/126/john-dobson:-on-the-toni...

We see a universe of matter and energy in space and time. Matter and energy are the same thing-- Einstein put that together with E=MC2; Space and time are the same thing. Einstein put those two together also with his theory of General Relativity and gravitation. Now whatever you look at you see it in the past (the light that carries the information has to reflect from an objects surface to your eye and that takes time.) You can't see anything when it happens. If you look at it from the point of view from Einstein's equations, the separation between you and what you see is always zero. You see things away from you in space by a trick of seeing backwards in time. You see the sun 8.5 light mins away by seeing it 8.5 light minutes ago. This what Indian philosophy calls Maya or illusion and maintains that space and time are mental concepts. Dobson terms Einstein's equations as the "Equations of Maya or Illusion" http://www.mystacki.com/#!/binder/41/john-dobson

I would like to introduce http://www.mystacki.com.

MyStacki allows you to organize your thoughts, ideas, research, writings, you-tube videos, google docs, links etc in stacks. Think of a stack as a collection of posts filed under a topic category. You then share this collection as a unit.

There are a large number of use cases for MyStacki: a teacher creating a stack of resources for her class; a poet publishing a stack of his poems; a student sharing his notes; a blogger creating a stack for each topic of his interest ; a researcher publishing his research. In fact wherever you need to present organized content like in a book or in a folder, and share it as a collection, MyStacki is your tool.