This blog has happened a bit by accident: for National Novel Writing Month in November, I decided to create a book of Nasruddin jokes for my dad as a Christmas present. This is the result: 50,000 words (that's how NaNoWriMo works), all about Nasruddin, the famous "wise fool" of the Middle East, along with Birbal, a court jester of India. Please feel free to download and read! I'm going to do a revised version for my dad's birthday in August, and your feedback would be very welcome.
Here's the book to download, plus a feedback form. I hope you will like it! Yes, it was done in haste for NaNoWriMo and is no doubt full of errors and things to fix/improve; I've got an errata list here, and I'll do a corrected PDF after I've accumulated a big bunch of items to correct.
Witty Tales of Nasruddin and Birbal (PDF)
You can also get a printed copy (print on demand) from Lulu.com; it's $5.99 there, plus shipping. Lulu does a great job with the printing; I've used them for some self-published Latin books in the past.
In this first version, the book contains 176 stories about Nasruddin and about Birbal; it was really fun to combine the Nasruddin and Birbal traditions together like this. There are so many stories I want to add; this is just what I got done during the month of November for NaNoWriMo.
So, my goal here for this blog is to keep accumulating more stories that I might consider adding to the book, and also to work on revising and editing the stories that appear in this "first draft" of the book.
My long-term goal is probably two books: I'll keep working on this fictional Nasruddin-Birbal project, but in a larger sense I want to do an annotated anthology of these stories where I can include notes, analyses, variants, etc. That's the kind of material that I can start to develop here!
I also want to create something like a "Story Finder" that will allow people to discover which stories appear in which books and, in particular, which stories are told about multiple characters. Instead of trying to use traditional tale types, I am coming up with my own typology system here. I'll be using those type numbers as labels here at the blog to try to help keep things organized. I've got about 600 story types so far; here is a partial listing: Story Types. You can put one of those T numbers in the search box and see if there is a blog post for it yet.
I also want to create something like a "Story Finder" that will allow people to discover which stories appear in which books and, in particular, which stories are told about multiple characters. Instead of trying to use traditional tale types, I am coming up with my own typology system here. I'll be using those type numbers as labels here at the blog to try to help keep things organized. I've got about 600 story types so far; here is a partial listing: Story Types. You can put one of those T numbers in the search box and see if there is a blog post for it yet.
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