Story in the anthology:
NOT A GOUDA STATE OF AFFAIRS: MELTING DOWN
📍 Location: Palo Alto, California, USA
✍️ Writing Space:
Wherever I am! A few times while on my phone, up on the catwalk at the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts between times when I worked the spotlight for productions of the play Shrek, which both of my daughters were in. Also, in the car, curled up on a comfy chair with the cats and/or dogs, at a café, anywhere.
Author Bio
Many of Susmita Ramani’s publications are on her WordPress. She attended U.C. Berkeley for her undergraduate degree in English and Juris Doctorate in Law. She is Associate General Counsel at a Bay Area investment fund that invests in the biotechnology sector.
💬 Is there something you passionately want the human race to stop doing? Something that might subtly appear in your writing/art…
Sometimes I think that if everyone had the same skin color, people could view each other with a lot more impartiality. In one of my pieces, The Influencer, an extraterrestrial-guided social media influencer excitedly advises everyone to turn their skin green the way that she has, and then “Greening Booths” pop up everywhere, and everyone eventually turns the same shade of green.
🐾 The best animal on earth is _______ because _______
The best animal on earth is whatever animal is in front of me, because I adore all animals. Our family has dogs, cats, guinea pigs, and aquatic frogs. But I love all animals that cross my path—goat, cow, pig, horse, duck, etc. They are tied with human babies as being the most vulnerable population there is—or perhaps they are even more vulnerable than babies, because a large number of humans view it as their right to farm and eat many types of animals. They can’t communicate with humans and need protection.
✍️ What got you into writing?
Definitely my parents. My dad read to me a lot, and did jigsaw puzzles with me. My mom, an English major well before I was, read to me constantly. One of my earliest memories is when she told me the stories of Shakespeare’s plays (as well as stories of Hindu gods and goddesses, of course!). Her favorite play was The Merchant of Venice, because of how noble Portia saved the day by posing as—what else?—a male lawyer named Balthazar! Note that I also later went into law!
📚 Is anyone in your family a writer? If yes, who?
My mother is the Artistic Director of a South Indian Classical Dance (Bharatanatyam) school called Shri Krupa, the oldest such school in the Bay Area (since the early 1970s). She has trained thousands of students, and they’ve won competitions all over the world—most recently including my two daughters, Zoey and Ava, who participated in a group dance performance in Italy and they won first place. My mom’s ability to make money from dedicating her life to the art form she most loves was always so inspiring to me.
My mother-in-law has acted in community theater in and around Berkeley (in the East Bay part of the Bay Area).
🌟 What inspires you to write?
The process of creating a story (of any size) feels like pulling off a magic trick, and I’ve found that I need steady doses of that kind of enchantment to sustain me emotionally and mentally. It’s the same thing that propels me in improvisational theater (which I also love and belong to a performing group)—finding the game, creating a world, discovering who the characters are and how they are related, and so on—i.e., just like writing, creating something out of nothing.
To get something published (= to reach an audience who wants to read the kind of stuff one writes) is tremendous. To think that people can hear my voice, and maybe that it made a positive ripple in the universe somewhere, is everything to me. It’s an antidote to anxiety about the general state of things in the world.
Also, as someday I, in my body, will be gone, perhaps some will still read my words. Perhaps my own daughters will, if they miss me enough and want to hear my voice. (They’ve read some of my stuff, but nothing close to all, being busy teenagers!)
The person who inspires me to keep going is the person I call my BeWriFri (Best Writing Friend), Rani Jayakumar. We read everything of each other’s, usually before submitting it anywhere, and we nearly always enter things together and both win. Once we co-wrote a story that got an Honorable Mention. Without her to spur me on, I think I might sometimes have let it drop for a while here and there, or at least not have been nearly as prolific as I have been. (As we both have been!)
📩 How do you handle rejection, and celebrate acceptance?
This is one of the greatest lessons of all. I have had loads and loads of rejection…and some acceptances peppered in after a while, then more acceptances than rejections. It was a long road to get there.
My journey as a writer more or less started out with my writing a novel (a few years ago), then a second, then a third—but, after unsuccessfully querying about them each in turn and getting no interest, I shelved them all. For the first novel, which I wrote over two or three years, I hired two professional (MFA teacher style) editors in succession to read each draft of the novel. I learned boatloads from them both. Sometimes a draft of a novel would be out to one of them, and I would be on pins and needles until I heard back, unable to stop obsessing about it. Then if the feedback was negative, I felt despondent. Then I tried Critique Circle (a great online writing workshopping community), and posted chapters of new novels, and got in turn both applause and evisceration, as one does. It toughened me up a lot.
After letting the novels go, I restarted with short pieces. Writing pieces of any size, but short pieces especially (100 words or under, like 42!), feels like it caters to the current attention span that I see around me, in my friends, husband, kids, and even myself. Now I have had somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 pieces published (including both poems and longer pieces, but all less than 20k words). I’ve also had scores of poems published at AllPoetry (a great writing community).
And now, either way, when I hear any news, I pride myself on being able to nod (either with a smile or a shrug) and just go on with normal life.
🔗 Social Media and Links to Work
📘 About 42 Stories Anthology Presents: Book of 42²
42 Stories Anthology Presents: Book of 42² features 1,764 stories, each exactly 42 words long, spanning 42 different genres. This global collection brings together 1,281 authors from around the world—new voices, seasoned writers, and everything in between—united by the challenge of saying more with less.
Available now in print, ebook, and audiobook formats:
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