Kavita Chhibber

I think the idea for writing a book was first brought to life in my 6^th grade Earth Science class. I recall discussing a computer game with a classmate. There was apparently some free time, so I drew a diagram of a strategy I had made. The next day, while our teacher was teaching, I got very bored. I pulled out my paper from the previous day, and just randomly started writing about chess. Two friends of mine who sat next to me started following my scribbles and soon started asking, “Gautam, made any progress on your book?” This was probably around August 2005. However, it was not until October, when I decided to seriously write a book. So, everyday in science class, I would write a little bit more, tediously drawing diagrams and writing practice problems. (I still had an A in science though!)

My two friends who sat next to me were supportive. For those of you who have been fortunate enough not to see it, my handwriting is very sloppy and somewhat illegible. One friend even erased some of my work and re-wrote it much more legibly. The original copy of the book was hand-written and I placed it in an overstuffed accordion-file-folder. Unfortunately, I would often lose pages, and had to re-write them. Hand-written page 47 gave me much trouble. I repeatedly lost that page, and re-wrote it about 5 times. By the end of the school year, I had completed my hand-written version of the book, which totaled about 85 pages. My goal over the summer was to expand and polish the book, and get it onto my computer.

Over the summer, I looked frantically on the internet for software. Not any software, but software I could use to create chess diagrams. I spent several hours searching, but none were satisfactory. Finally, exasperated from hours of searching, I found one that would suit my needs. I opened up Open Office (a free-ware version of Microsoft Office), got into the word processing system and started writing. I had written about 20 or 30 pages, when I decided to switch to Microsoft word. Open Office was just too “buggy” to work for this kind of stuff. I copied it to Microsoft word, and continued.

There was the issue of the title. What should I call my book? It needed to be to the point: The reader should be able to figure out what the book was about. I examined my book, and noted down the following about it:

It was difficult to incorporate all of the aforementioned into one title, but I finally decided on one. From then on I decided, my book would be known as The Novice Chess Player’s Manual: A Step-by-Step Guide and Workbook for the Budding Chess Player.

At the end of summer, I had expanded the book and it was now all saved on my computer. It totaled about 280 pages. However, it was unedited, was not formatted, and some content needed to be added. I edited it the best I could, and finished that by about November. My friend Ajit Acharya created a spectacular cover and a publishing company picked up the book. The publishing company and I worked together to create an index, format and typeset the book, edit the book more thoroughly, and get everything ready. I added three chapters, cut down some material, and reduced the page count to 256. It was a time consuming process, and unexpected glitches and delays pushed back the publication date to October 2006. In August 2006, everything was complete, and the books were being printed.

I felt my heart would explode out of excitement when the publishing company told me the books were fully printed and bound. When I finally saw the first copy, I was “happy as a clam.” Copies have already been sold, and I have decided to autograph the first 100 copies to get them moving.

What have I learned from this experience? I have learned so much, things that no book or training course could ever teach. I have found a new appreciation for authors, and the amount of effort and hard work that goes into writing, publishing and marketing books. It took me two years to write mine! I learned how the publishing industry works, the “do’s and don’ts” of book formatting, and much more.

My advice for anyone thinking about writing a book is this: Have your target audience in mind as you write your book. Is the audience big enough? What stores do they visit what magazines they subscribe to, etc. You need to have a key “hook”. What makes your book different from the many other books out there? For example, my book is different because it allows the reader to engage in learning interactively, teaches about chess tournaments, and goes slowly to cement understanding. Also, make sure you are qualified to write the book. I won the National Championship for my section, and I also looked at it from a perspective of whether such a book was needed. I feel that if I had a book like the one I have written for a beginner, it would have cut down my learning curve by quite a bit. It’s been a rewarding experience writing a book, and I hope you have the pleasure of writing one too.

Title: The Novice Chess Players Manual: A Step-by-Step Guide and Workbook for the Budding Chess Player

Junior High Students usually don’t have the slightest clue on how to write a document for a club to persuade them that you are the best choice. I didn’t, but after a talk with my writing teacher, I turned out to have one of the best persuasive reports. Here are some tips and a sample report to base your essay on. Hope it helps!

(First introduce yourself and state why you should be in the club or anything else.)

Hello, my name is Nikkita Khanna, although my fellow classmates and staff members refer to me as Nikki. I would like to be a member of the well known National Junior Honor Society, and I assure you that if I become a member, I will work my hardest to reach the society’s needs. To become a member, the society has asked for five main qualities which are scholarship, leadership, service, character, and citizenship.

Scholarship - the character, qualities, or achievements of a learned person. To have been invited to NJHS is such an honor, and it means very much to me. I learned that all the work I have been doing, for example, studying on weekends, having to pass on get-togethers to work on stories for Greenhorn.Net, or refining my sports skills while my favorite movie is on has paid off. I have, at least, a GPA of 3.5, having fun the clubs I have joined, and one of the bests on my sport teams. My promise to you is that I will keep all of this going throughout the rest of my educating life.

(Then give your second reason. Remember to give examples from real life, teachers like them!)

Leadership- the ability to lead. Throughout elementary and middle school, I have been in charge of at least one thing. My teachers always told me that I was trusted by them and they knew that I would do the right thing. I enjoy taking the lead anywhere, but I never order anyone around. I believe to become a leader you must have these qualities: perseverance, knowledge, morality, carefulness, hard-working, and sportsmanship. I might have to work on some of these qualities, but I do know that I have every single one of them. I also know that if accepted into NJHS, this little community can help me with each quality and many more.

(For every reason, there is a paragraph, usually 3 reasons are the best. You might want to mention dreams.)

Service- the work or action performed by one that serves. Helping people of any type fill joy inside of me. In

India

, my native country, I enjoy giving money or food to the destitutes on the streets. It breaks my heart to see a human being in those types of conditions everyday of their lives. A young child dream is when they grow up to become rich, like all the celebrities and after that don’t do anything at all. My dream is to grow up, get rich, and help the needy. I am also in my neighborhood’s community organization (NCO). In this organization we organize all types of holiday events, block parties, garage sales and much more. Organizing all these events are fun and hard work.

(Describe yourself in a paragraph: Your hobbies, your attudtitude, your way of life.)

Character - the group of qualities that make a person, group, or thing different from others. Different people have different characters. Some might have mean characters, sad characters, cheerful characters, sympathetic characters, and social characters. I would describe my character as a mix of all different adjectives. My mom says I’m unpredictable. One thing that I always do is help people and make them happy. I love seeing the smile on people’s faces when I tell a joke or help them in some kind of way. A selfish characteristic about is me is that I love getting compliments, gifts, or recommendations from anyone. Many friends of mine say that they tell me everything because they know I won’t tell anybody about what they have said to me. Like I said in the leadership paragraph, I know the difference between r the leadership paragraph, I know the difference between right and wrong and I always try to aim for the right things only. During my whole school life I never have been called to the principle’s office for doing something bad, except for one misunderstanding that was cleared up. I admit that I make a lot of mistakes, but I also do a lot of good deeds.

(Write about something you know the person reading will like. Patriotism always works, but don’t let it look so obvious.)

Citizenship-possession of the rights and privileges of a citizen. Before I go to sleep every night, I pray to God that all the people that are fighting for our freedom and justice are safe. I am aware that freedom and justice is not a right but a privilege that I will cherish my whole life. At this time, citizens say people are losing patriotism because of the war, but I disagree. In fact, I am gaining patriotism knowing that our country is helping another country that has had trouble for many years. July 4^th is one of my favorite holidays not only for the ice cream and fireworks, but how I see that I’m not the only one who still loves the

United States of America

I hope you have learned more about me and make me the member of NJHS. Thank you very much for the invitation, which is a little achievement just by itself.

(End with a thanking sentence. For example, I would like to thank you for your time and I hope you will consider me. This format could be used for anything in the persuasive realm. Hope this was helpful to you!)

Nikkita Khanna is in the 8^th grade at Lower Macungie Middle School Pennsylvania.

I am a year and a half into my college career at the University of Georgia. I’m not even halfway through (although at the rate I change my major, an average of 17 times per semester, I may not even be a quarter of the way through), but I have accumulated a wealth of knowledge. Let’s ignore the fact that none of it comes out of the textbooks I’ve spent more money on than actual tuition.

Without further adieu, I present to you....NISHITA’S COLLEGE WISDOM, THUS FAR. Very useful for high school students; parents might want to stop reading now.

1) It is perfectly normal to change your major 17 times a semester. Your advisor will not judge you; they will just wordlessly hand you the “Change of Major” form without blinking.

2) You may have woken up every morning at 7:30 a.m. and gone to school for 8 hours a day for 12 years, but in college you will struggle to wake up for your 12:30 pm class. And good luck forcing yourself to stay through the whole thing if you make it there in the first place.

3) If you feel, that waking up by 12:30 is enough of a feat and actually going to class is pushing your limits, PLEASE use your class time to go to the gym instead. Freshman 15 is not a myth.

4) The first few weeks of any class that you take, you will physically see students slowly burn through their non-renewable motivation source. You will see full classrooms, copious note-taking, possibly even some students staying to talk to the professor after class for extra help. By midterms, classes will have emptied out significantly, and the few students who do remain in class will have their laptops with them. Even if it’s a math class. If you sit in the back like I do, you will see that every single person is on Facebook. If you don’t know what Facebook is, don’t bother going to college.

5) This is my first year living in my own apartment. I’m I’m not even going to start talking about dorms because they are something in their own element. Your parents will suggest living there beyond the freshman year requirement, but DON’T DO IT. When I was personally dungeoned, I had a friend plug a hair dryer in her room and knock out the power on our entire hall. Later that weeks signs were posted restricting the use of beauty appliances to the bathrooms only. The lack of hot water, the occasional brown water, and the overabundance of cockroaches is also a mild inconvenience.

6) Aforementioned apartment is one of the ritziest in the vicinity, but does nothing for the worthless excuse of a kitchen. The maintenance people aren’t really on their game, so we have a supposedly unfixable dishwasher that works sometimes and most of the time doesn’t. When it does, it spews venom in the form of bubbles. As in, my roommate came home one day and there were bubbles everywhere, like you’d see on TV. I thought this was my fault since I can’t do housework for anything and I’d been the one to do the dishes, but then it happened again a couple days later, and now it happens regularly, although now there’s just a lot of water leakage and not too many bubbles. Anyway, the other day I was making dinner (I’ve learned to make various pastas now, including and limited to ramen noodles; macaroni and cheese on especially prosperous days) and the dishwasher starts leaking and I’m about to tend to that when our hypersensitive (and thus obviously female) smoke alarm goes off because you can be making TOAST and the smoke alarm will go off and then you have to run and air the entryway out and while you’re doing that you’ve either a) totally screwed up the time settings on whatever you’re cooking so it will just be pathetically undercooked no matter what you do or b) burned the hell out of it and if it’s the latter you might as well give up on your battle with the smoke alarm. So, beware of smoke alarms and your abundance of burned food.

7) You will force yourself to mentor inner-city children with terrible attitudes on the weekends not for the personal satisfaction of having an impact on a child’s life or even for grad school application padding", but simply to avoid seeing your parents. If you thought they nagged you about late nights out in high school, it is far worse on the weekends when they want you to come home and pretend like it doesn’t affect your social formation.

8) Although you used to be able to live off 4 hours of sleep a night, you will now need the full recommended 8 hours and frequent naps. (In class is okay. At least you’re there.)

9) You will always have one roommate who cannot pay the bills on time and eats everyone else’s food.

10) You’re around a lot of people now, so expect to get sick literally every week. The common cold will become especially common. Supposedly alcohol has a detrimental effect on your immune system, but college is about embracing the risks, right?

11) It doesn’t matter if you had a course load of all AP classes and still managed a 4.0 unweighted GPA in high school. Just count on losing HOPE(a scholarship in

Georgia

). Start detailing the excuses for your parents now.

12) College is the best time of your life; there is no denying it. You truly find your passions and interests, find your best friends, and gain worldly wisdom. As far as actual class work goes...Well, every November and April, your motto will automatically become, “It’s just one semester, the next one will be better.” After a while, however, you will realize that little saying only applies to summer session. At GPC.(Georgia perimeter college)

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in these columns are solely those of the writers and do not necessarily represent those of the editor/publisher.