It is described as an anthology of horror and comedy stories. The following is the blurb on the cover:

Boy meet girl. Both fall in love. Boy proposes marriage. Girl postpones decision for one month. Girl say she leave next day. Until then, boy try impress girl by telling stories — funny stories… scary stories… and all kinds in between. No worries everything end well.

The stories were tough to come by. Like dead men, he tells no tales. Having given up on fiction years ago, he had to marshall some old personal anecdotes, wild tales told by others, and even some vividly detailed nightmares. Like a male Scheherazade, he wove these yarns together and just about managed to bag his babe. How good were the tales? What were they about? For all questions like that, you will have to buy this book.

Well, there is an exorcism, a haunted lift, a werewolf… all of them supernatural paranormal urban fantasies.

http://www.vsubhash.in/unlikely-stories-novel.html

Here are some highlights about the book:

• Because I cannot churn out fiction like I can with non-fiction, I have relied on some real incidents and nightmares that I had encountered.
• The entire book is in first person.
  • This means that there are no boring descriptions of the the scenery or the weather that authors typically use to fill the pages.
  • Everything happens very fast. If you miss a line, you miss a joke, the plot or even the finale.
• I am not comfortable using fake names so there are only two names (other than the lead who is identified as Subhash) in the whole book
  • Vampira: She is the ‘babe’ who is being wooed by the narrator. She had once had vampire phase when she acquired a lot of tattoos and dental surgery to look like a vampire. Although she regrets it now and has got rid of the tattoos, she still retains the fangs. That is why the lead refers to her as Vampira. That’s not her name.
  • Mademoiselle Zuma: This is a medium. This is the rival of another lead who appears in some of the stories. Her name is from a medium from an episode of the vintage radio show Duffy’s Tavern.
• Even place names have been avoided. There is however one funny story set in NYC.
• I have not read any vampire novels. On Booktube, a book called Twilight is very popular. Its vampire theme seemed ridiculuous to me. In my book, I make a lot of fun of the practical difficulties of having a vampire or a werewolf as a partner.
• Most important of all, the book is extremely funny. Not just few jokes scattered here and there. Every every dialogue has a joke. It will be like reading the script of a sitcom.
• There is no sex in the novel. The lead couple get married first and the novel ends there. There is some nudity (very minimally described) because one character tends to shape-shift. There is also some description of effective contraceptive methods that I decided to include because these novels are typically read by young people.
• The finale is an over-the-top parody of the controversy about men writing women. It involves one Stone Age Man (SAM) and one Stone Age Woman (SAW) discovering sex by accident. This is described in the most funniest and prudish manner that it might be alright to say there is no sex in the novel.
• The paperback is $7.70 and ebook is $6.00. You can read the ebook for free if you have the Kindle Unlimited subscription.

A PDF sample of the book is available at
http://www.vsubhash.in/unlikely-stories-novel.html

In my first year. It must be a record.

The first book was published in February 2020. The last book published in February 2021 was the 20th.

Amazon held up one paperback. Given how sensitive they are to outspoken writers, I did not pursue it. If that book was not held up, I would have finished my first year in publishing with 21 books.

The last few books are:

• Linux Command-Line Tips & Tricks
  
• Cool Electronic Projects
  
• How To Invest In Stocks (2nd edition)
  The first edition was released in 2003 as a free ebook and continues to be available as free.
  
• Ólafia L. Óla’s Favourite Traditional Nursery Rhymes (Illustrated)
  

Ólafia is one of my pseudonyms. I could not get ebook stores to publish my combined ebook version of World Of Word Ladder books. It is now a free gift for subscribers to my newsletter.

To celebrate the publication of the 20th book, I delisted the ebook of FFMPEG Quick Hacks one month early. It is currently hosted on Dropbox because my hosting provider has been suffering several DDOS attacks lately.

There is a Facebook group called something like 20BooksTo50K. I have not had any success with my twenty books. They are mostly non-fiction and not related to any one niche. There seems to be some shadow-banning as well. Amazon wants to make money from its customers. Failing that, it wants to make money from authors with their ads program. This an optimization to an extreme extent.

So, I have quit writing books… for now. I am now adding the latest books to back of all the other books. After that, I will take a break. I have proved I am a better writer than all the rest. So there! Mission accomplished.

I have also updated all my apps – Java and Android – with links to the new website at www.VSubhash.in. I regained control of VSubhash.com. Hosting is extremely expensive now that Net4 is bankrupt and its owner is on the run from police.

After the sites have stabilized, I will be working on my Javascript-free CMS – SqlSiteServer. It needs to have a RSS reader and mailing list functionality. I also have lots of electronic projects waiting to be explored.

Because of the lockdown, I upgraded my DSL internet connection to fibre. The connection is fast but stalls every now and then. I still cannot stream videos and I continue to watch videos offline. The local sons-of-monkeys continue to switch off the electricity supply several times a day. There is no let up in the harassment. These pigs also cause voltage fluctuations at other times. This has happened in three Indian states. It must be a coincidence.

I bought two UPS devices for my network devices. These newfangled devices are called ‘router UPS’ and ensure that the net connection is always on. Even if the electricity goes off, online classes can continue. They are like power banks but with DC power connectors for network routers, modems and switches. You just connect your existing power adapter to the router UPS and the router UPS to the network device. After that, the network does not go down with a power cut. If you have a laptop with battery, you continue to work for several hours into the blackout.

Written, edited, illustrated, designed and produced all of them as ebooks and paperbacks without spending a dime. I still have two more months to complete one year.

In the beginning of 2020, I was trying to get my 2020 jokebook published by a traditional publisher without success. Without much hope, I created a subset with 400 jokes and published it on Amazon KDP. This was in March. It did not sell at all, as I was not promoting it anywhere. (Later, I made its ebook permafree and it remains one of top free humour books there.)

Meanwhile, I contacted a NY editor by mistake and she suggested I split the books – one for kids and one for adults. I suggested that I will create a subset for kids but the full book will continue cater to both adults and kids. She said okay and asked me to send the manuscript. After that, no answer. The lockdown was imposed at that time and I decided to wait for it to be lifted.

While I waited, I decided to write a book with my editorial cartoons. I had 149 cartoons at that time and self-published them in a 400+ page book! Both color and grayscale. The price of the color book is over $60.

Knowing that the price of gold would shoot up, I rushed to Palakkad and bought one sovereign of gold at Rs. 30,000. The price today shows a profit of Rs. 20,000!

As 2020 was slipping by and with no end to lockdown, I decided to publish the two jokebooks. That was in July. I should not have waited. I began writing one book every month. Later, the pace picked up and I now have written 16 books! A total of 18 titles including the two subsets. I created some other children’s books under the pseudonym Ólafía L. Óla.

One day, I was going to update my FFmpeg article that I had written for Open Source For You magazine when it struck me that I could write a book on FFmpeg. This was a good decision. The book is I think the best book on FFmpeg.

By then, I had half a dozen books. I made a few books free for some time or permanently, and posted their Amazon links on Reddit. That is the only promotion I did outside of my website. Purchases slowly picked up.

My run of bad luck had other dimesions. The website got lost. It went down with Net4India, the domain and hosting provider, after its owner was arrested or whatever. I had to start a new domain: www.vsubhash.in

Now, there is almost one sale every day and double that number when including free books. I will be making the FFmpeg ebook free in April. There will be some drop in sales because of that. Overall, things seems to be looking up.

• 2020 Fresh Clean Jokes For Everyone – $12
• 2020 Fresh Clean Jokes For Kids – $10
• 400 Fresh Clean Jokes For Everyone – $6.99
• FFMPEG Quick Hacks – $34 (full-color)
• CommonMark Ready Reference – $6
• Learn To Ride A Motorcycle In Five Minutes – $6
• Vastu Shastra Explained – $7.77 (full color), $6 (grayscale)
• A Really Traditional Alphabet Book – $8
• Animalia Humorosum – $11 (full-color)
• Email Newsletter Strategies For Profit – $7
• World of Word Ladders (2 volumes) – $7
• The Devil’s Dictionary (Illustrated) – $8
• Dictionary Of Indian English – $1 (ebook)

The rest of my books are published under some other pseudonyms.

In other news, I made another trip to Chennai on my bike. The trains and stations were deserted. I later went to Pazhani. Lockdown was lifted and everything was looking normal. In Kerala, lockdown continues.