Goodreads asked Bhakta Jim:

How do you get inspired to write?

Bhakta Jim Back in 1980 I had just gotten out of the Hare Krishna movement through deprogramming. A woman I cared about was still in the movement and I wanted to get her out. There were a lot of things going on in my head and I decided to write a memoir of my experiences and try to get it published. I wrote a rough draft on a manual typewriter and made copies for some friends but I never could bring myself to revise it for publication, and I figured that there wasn't likely to be much interest from publishers in a book like that anyway, so I put the manuscript in a box and ignored it for thirty years.

I got involved with the One Laptop Per Child project and ended up writing a book on computer programming aimed at children and their teachers. This was a fun project so I looked for something else I could write for OLPC and came up with the idea of writing a manual for making e-books. In the process of researching the subject I learned about Optical Character Recognition and realized that I had a way to turn my old manuscript into something that could be edited with a word processor. I had published my OLPC books using Create Space and realized that I could publish the memoir the same way.

The memoir needed a lot of work. Thirty years had passed and ISKCON was a different movement than it was in 1979. I decided to revise the original text and add a commentary to it from the point of view of someone looking back at his wasted youth. The result was The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim and while it has not had a wide readership it has gotten some positive reviews on Amazon.

After that I decided to try my hand at fiction and I'm still working on that.

flag