Arts
First came the story, then came the genre
Three characters with different backgrounds thrust together to try and solve a murder. Amanda Jay (Jayatissa) says this is what her book , ‘The Other One’ is about in a nutshell. She says the mystery was what she was most focused on and that she didn’t even identify the genre on her own. “I never picked this genre to write in – it wasn’t something that I made a conscious decision to do. I didn’t set out trying to create a fantasy world – I set out trying to tell this story and it just so happened that the world was created to accommodate this story,” she says, explaining that it was her friends who identified the book as a particular genre of science fiction – a category called ‘steampunk’ to be precise.
Amanda with her Fairway award at the recently concluded Galle Literary Festival
Because of the genre, she initially didn’t market or publish the book in Sri Lanka but having done that, today she is the winner in the English category of the Fairway National Literary Award 2017, which was announced at the Fairway Galle Literary Festival.
30-year-old Amanda Jayatissa attended Bishops College and Colombo International School for her Advanced Level exams. She completed a degree in Mills College, California majoring in International Relations and minoring in sociology and worked in the United States before moving to the United Kingdom after she married her husband Chathura Jayatissa. She currently runs three companies – Sterling Language Solutions, The Brick Lane Cookie Company and Save Your Monkey.
Amanda says that she never expected the win – and even told her parents and in-laws not to come for the award ceremony. “Getting a stamp of approval from the award committee that the book is at least in decent shape was a great relief,” she says.
When judge Dr. Ranjini Obeysekere started giving comments on the books in ascending order of the winners, “it was so confusing – I was sitting next to Shankari (Chandran) and we were just chatting and they started with the third runner-up and after they did the critique on that they said ‘the next two runners-up are very similar in that they both dealt with historical fiction’ and I thought ‘no!’ and in that moment you don’t even want to hope because you’ve managed your expectations and you don’t want to get your hopes up.”
“I kept sneaking looks at my husband and we were confused and when they said Shankari’s book was a close second and then when they started giving comments on her book even still I thought there must be a mistake. Even midway through that I looked back and my husband and my brothers and friends were cheering and I thought ok!,” she says, adding that it still hasn’t hit her that she won.
‘Steampunk’ is a subgenre of science fiction which focuses on machinery used just after the beginning of the industrial revolution, usually in an alternate universe.
Amanda’s book is based on the universe of Mliss, and she says the reason she created this universe is because our world simply could not accommodate her characters.
There are faint hints of Sri Lanka in the book. “A few elements like religion and ethnic conflict I’ve drawn from growing up in Sri Lanka but I didn’t want to set it at a particular place,” she explains.
She first published her book in May 2017 – on KDB – Amazon’s self-publishing software and it became an instant success – reaching the ‘hot new sellers’ list, number 3 on the science fiction list and number 1 on the steampunk list – “which for me was mind blowing, I did not expect that at all,” says Amanda. She didn’t market the book because she was busy finishing her masters, launching one of her companies and also because she is very self-conscious when she knows people are reading what she writes.
Amanda had written three drafts of her book and had her third draft edited by a professional editor before she released it online. She is still surprised at the positive reviews she receives. “I thought it would be just my friends and family who would read this and they would anyway compliment me because they are my friends and family but I’ve been getting a lot of messages lately from complete strangers who say that they have read the book and they loved it. A lot of them are Sri Lankans and I never thought there would even be a market for books like this,” she says.
Amanda’s planning her next book, but she is unsure of a title. “I have started outlining ‘The Next One’ and that’s a joke that’s going on now,” she says, explaining that everyone has silly titles for her second book. “It’s going to be set in this same universe but not with these characters because I really feel that they have reached the end of their story. This book ends on a hopeful note and I want to pick up ten years from the end of that story and kind of talk about what happened to that hope and how it ended up. As a nation, as people we have these pinnacles in our lives where we think after we reach this everything’s going to be ok but what happens ten years after you’ve reached that? Are you still happy? What happens next?” she explains, adding that the book will have a stronger mystery element.