The aim of any university's creative writing program is, of course, to produce the next Dave Eggers. The Hopkins Writing Seminar Department professors would love to boast that one of their students went on, after graduation, to publish a novel or a collection of stories. But sophomores Dylan Diggs and Nazia Rahman didn't wait until after graduation to begin their publishing career. Diggs published his first novel, The Palladium, a futuristic sci-fi thrillerin 2003, and Rahman published her 600-page fantasy tome, Rings of Light: AyurVeda, in the same year. Despite the fact that both books are available on Amazon.com, few students on campus know Rahman or Diggs are published authors.
Unbeknownst to Tristan Davies, his Rudiments of Fiction student Nazia has published almost as many books as he has. Both students try to keep their authorship on the down-low.
"I don't advertise [my book on campus], which is probably a bad idea." said Diggs. "It was weird to see my TA forIFPbuy my book at the Book Fair in Baltimore this year."
"It's not a really big accomplishment," Rahman said, "I don't want a lot of people to know about it."
While Rahman may not think spending several years drafting, writing, editing and printing a 612-page book is a "big accomplishment," writing students who stress out over one-page, double-spaced short story assignments might beg to differ. The intense Hopkins workload generally prevents either writer from working on his novels while at school.
Rahman, a Biology and Writing Seminars double major, says, "There's not enough time to write. I need to be studying, you know, my bio-chem."
Diggs finished revising his two latest books, Palladium II: Second Contact and Palladium III: Trust No One last summer. "I never worked on them at Hopkins," said Diggs, who is currently developing two more novels, a fourth Palladium book and a novel called Adem-3, which, according to Diggs, "basically brings Greek myths into a sci-fi world."
Though both are talented, both Diggs and Rahman managed to write and publish their books with a mix of sheer tenacity and publishing connections. Diggs's father, Eric Diggs, owns Sights Productions, a small printing company.
"I sent the book to my dad first, and he liked it and wanted to print it," said Diggs. "If he didn't like it, I would've looked for other publishers." So far, The Palladium has sold under 100 copies.
"We're probably going to do mailings to libraries, bookstores and people in the publishing world," said Diggs, who hopes to sell more copies of the next two installments. "We might send mailings to newspapers to get reviews."
"I didn't try to send [Rings of Light] to publishers; I was too lazy," said Rahman, who self-published her book through a company called Authorhouse. "That would have taken too long, and I wanted to put it on my college applications." Rahman paid "between $500 and $600," to publish her paperback. Diggs and Rahman are sort of oddballs in the Writing Seminars clique.
For one thing, neither one claims to be an indie rock fan. Diggs is a Republican, and though Rahman writes her fiction in English, it is not her first language.
Rahman is a pre-med and Diggs is a political science major. Classes such as Intro to American Politics helped Diggs write the Palladium series, which deals with agents of the fictitious terrorist-fighting American Defense Agency's search for a missing senator 150 years in the future.
"I had to change a lot of stuff in the books after taking some [politcal science] classes at Hopkins," Diggs said. "Now they're a lot more informative, in a sci-fi kind of way."
Their choice of topics for writing also distinguishes Diggs and Rahman from the pack. Rahman went through "a big fantasy phase in middle school" and loved books such as Of Two Minds and More Minds, and the novels of Sharon Shinn.
Her love for both fantasy and princess literature (Rahman also enjoyed the Princess Diaries series) influenced the plot of Rings of Light, which follows a beautiful, noble girl named Violet as she falls in with a gang of thieves in a parallel universe. Rahman doesn't exclusively write fantasy, though.
"What I'm most proud of is a tie between Rings of Light and Never Just a Rumor," her 30-chapter novella available exclusively at fictionpress.com, a website for posting and responding to fiction. "Never Just a Rumor because it's different. Renae had a crush on Trent and his boyfriend had a crush on Renae."
Never Just a Rumor, which garnered 921 mainly positive comments on fictionpress.com, combines classic teen bed-swapping drama with inter-subcultural comedy, mistaken identities and an ultimately satisfying conclusion.
"I love getting feedback and hearing that people like the stories," she said.
Both credit Writing Seminars course work with improving their fiction skills. "Before, I would never want to write something short," said Rahman, who wrote plenty of short stories in IFP I and IFP II her freshman year. "I'd never liked poetry at all, but IFP has really turned me on to it."
"When I wrote the first book, I was not as good a writer as I am now," Diggs said. "[The Palladium] is not as good as the ones coming out now."
