Summary picture from Ashwini's blog

When Dr. Suess wrote Oh! the places You'll Go he was talking to little kids, or perhaps only I thought he was. The thing is it's never to late to go places, and these places can be real world places like the Great Wall Of China or the Skeleton Lake of Roopkund, or it can be metaphorical places, like achievements you never even chased but somehow landed up with. And that's what I learned from parenting.

My life twisted around a sharp bend when I chose to become a stay at home mom after doing a postdoc in Physics. It seemed like a great scary abyss ahead. Life was changing and who knew how. The thing about scary, is that it opens up a vista of possibilities.

With nothing better to do than bend and bow and cater to the whims and fancies of her majesty, my two year old daughter, I had loads of time on my hands. Haha! How many of you actually nodded along? Bet those of you who did have never spent 30 minutes locked up with a toddler.

Anyway, to guide her majesty on a path to becoming an avid reader, I started writing children's stories. Yeah, you can be as creative as you want to be, with parenting. It doesn't have to be a tedious job. No doubt, it will have it's tedious aspects, but which job doesn't?

I wrote about 30 stories in the Tania Series and then graduated on to short chapter books. Finally, a few weeks ago I published my first novel for young adults titled Growing Pains, and can you believe that I was actually interviewed for it!

So if you are at a turning point in your life, I wish you the very best, for all the awesome adventures ahead. You can check out my interview with Ashwini, to catch glimpses of my journey as a writer and a mom, that are so incredibly intertwined, that it's hard to say where one persona ends and the other begins.

Here is a little excerpt from the interview:

You have written around 15 books for children! Kudos! Give us some tips to write a good children’s book.

A: I use my daughter as a sounding board for my books. If she is listening with rapt attention, I know I have a winner. If she is surreptitiously scooting off to play with the cat, then it’s back to the drawing board for me. I heavily draw upon my daughter’s experiences and my own childhood experiences for ideas to make the stories easy for kids to relate to.

Now hop on here, to read the rest.