The Inception of Veer Singh and The Quest of the Golden Apple
I've been wanting to write a book for as long as I can remember but only actively pursued it once COVID hit. It happened so organically that I’m often speechless when people ask me how did I think of writing a book.
During COVID, running after Omaha all day was pretty much all I did. After a long day, we did our lights-out routine and as I lay into bed, I realized I haven't read Omaha his bedtime story. Let me just make one up I thought. That was what laid the seed for this book. Omaha enjoyed and laughed at certain parts of the story so much that he asked me to tell it to him 6 times that night. When we woke up, he heard it about 6 times again and after repeating it the 12th time in 12 hours, I recorded it in my voice memos. I shared it with a couple of friends whose kids loved it as well and I penned it down to create the first draft of the book in October 2020.
I sat on the idea to publish it for about 14 months and in December 2021, I reworked the story to make the storyline more inclusive. I then started looking for feedback from people supporting Sikh art and literature and reached out to Sikh Coalition. The director at that time Satjeet highly recommended Harleen Kaur, a budding Sikh artist who had worked as the Education and Community Engagement Manager and was now a full-time artist. From our first meeting, her enthusiasm, cheerful attitude, and style of artwork impressed me. I can't imagine how the book would've turned out without her beautiful illustrations, professional work ethic, attention to detail, and marketing and graphic design experience.
As we were working through the drafts every single word in the book has been mulled over - the names of the characters. Why we chose Veer Singh as the name of our main character was published in a newsletter by Dr. Gayatri Sethi and our book was featured in the Sikh Heritage Month article. Here is the link - https://desibookaunty.substack.com/p/sikh-heritage-month. We went through the same process with the illustrations with Harleen working on some final edits even when her hand was injured after seeing the dummy copy in December 2022.
16 months later and after 75 rounds of edits, we had the final book in our hands. The number of hours we put in is innumerable but the creative satisfaction we got on getting the retail copy is ineffable! We hope you enjoy reading the book as much as we have enjoyed creating it! We hope you fall in love with little Veer Singh and you can follow his journey as he goes on more adventures with him in the future!
