I'm no Dan Brown, Damn it!

What does it take for someone (all right, not ‘someone’, read ‘yours truly’) to be a Dan Brown?
Why Dan brown you may ask, of all people on this flat, crowded, exploding earth?
I ask, why not?
Isn’t he the most happening, selling name in this given moment? And he happens (though not incidentally) to be an author too. An author, not like me, of course. On the contrary, an author who needs no publicity yet gets oodles of it, who needs no money anymore (come on, he must have stopped longing for money soon after Da Vinci), yet gets windfall after windfall, whose book needs no reviews actually, yet gets written about in mixed tones, although the writings have no bearing on readers’ decision to lunge at it.
So if someone were to ask me whose shoes I would like to be in these current times, it would be Man Brown’s. I mean, Dan Brown’s. But the trouble is the shoe wouldn’t fit, even if he were to give me a pair gratis. And getting the shoe to fit is what the struggle of a start up author is all about.
A remark that was casually flung at me recently woke me up to the reality of the unfitting shoe. I hadn’t even thought of it remotely till then. But when someone made a snide comment that I was no Dan Brown and I could expect no instant ground swell of response or support for my first book, I told myself, albeit wryly, “Well, it’s true. I am no Dan Brown.”
And it has become my favourite pick up line since then.
I am no Da(m)n Brown.
It has given me an apt excuse to hand out to people who thought my first book should have done a million copies by now and my name should have been splashed all over and I should have gone to the Alps to celebrate the success. (God save them from insanity and bless them for their innocence).
It saves me from explaining the difficulties of being a first timer, gives me the strength to fight, the freedom to fail and a point to ponder when I have little else to do – what, after all, does it take to be a Dan Brown?
I may never figure out the trick, but for the moment, I am content with the fact that I share a corner of the cyber space with him. Find my book nestling below The Lost Symbol on http://www.oxfordbookstore.com/dotcom/oxford/
It is nowhere near getting the shoe to fit, but it at least gives me the satisfaction of having gone to the same high end shoe shop from where he gets his pair, sat next to his seat for a while and then walked out dragging my unshod feet, acknowledging that I am no Dan Brown.” This time, not so wryly.