Frustrated Writer Seeks Publisher

As a travel writer with a few books under my belt, I often receive emails from frustrated writers who need some help with their sales and marketing, or at least some advice on getting an agent to sell their book to a publisher. Many letters are rather hopeless, but Aaron seems serious about getting his novel about India in print, and it seems to be a venture after my own heart....wandering around India and having an adventure.

The above photos of mine were taken in India, when I was....wandering around and having an adventure. There's a guard at a royal palace in Jodphur, two female tribals on religious pilgrimage in Tamil Nadu, and a bookstore in Calcutta.

Epiphany and wisdom can come from the strangest of places, like tripping on LSD in the slums of Calcutta during the Festival of Colours, where everyone is covered in paint. This happens to Aaron, 36, an Australian ex-punk rocker, ex-small time crook, ex-heroin addict, X-gener on the run from a failed marriage to a night club diva. Painted green, he realises he is free as long as he lives in the proverbial now.

He reflects back on how he departed Australia with long time friend and occasional partner in crime Frankie, a deluded society misfit and failed artist. Often mistaken as a terrorist and occasionally even Osama Bin Laden, Frankie, who thinks he is really an alien, convinces Aaron to go to India to ‘find himself’. Aaron agrees after he discovers he has a contract is on his life for stealing a cocaine dealer mistress. Arriving in Bollywood for Christmas, then Goa for New Years Eve, they end up in the hippy utopia, Auroville.

Aaron falls out with Frankie who changes his name to The Kobra (the K representing his newly discovered Kundaline powers). Frankie the Kobra is in his element, befriending the urine drinking commune elite and seducing doe eyed hippy chicks. Aaron heads for the Andaman Islands, a remote tropical paradise, where he makes a living fleecing tourists in poker, agreeing to re-unite with Frankie in Calcutta for the Festival of Colours. But Frankie never turns up.

Shanti, Bloody Shanti