Dana Jetey is an author from Kazakhstan. She is also a teacher of English and a translator of books. She started translating books in 2009 and published her first translated book in 2010. Since then, she has had four books published and a dozen books translated for different authors from different countries. She has two daughters and a son.
The book is a set of three stories about a girl at different stages of her life. Her dreams as a child and her aspirations on the way to achieve her goals turned out somewhat different from what she had ever wished and expected. “Life is Like a Box of Chocolates…” you never know what you are going to get” is relatable to all three stories. And then, there is that banal life, in which she finds herself with kids, a husband, and all the problems that overwhelm and distract her from what she always wanted to do. So, one day, there comes a realization… but in a very foreboding way…
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How I started writing
In the year 2009 or maybe 2010, Timur Bekmambetov (you might know his movies “Wanted” and “Profile”), a film director, producer, screenwriter, and tech entrepreneur, announced a contest for the best screenplay in Kazakhstan. Maybe some of you remember that. I was crazy about that! I thought this was it! This is my opportunity to do something, to write and get noticed… Well, like my ex-husband then said: “Joanne Rowling’s fame is galling you”… Maybe it was true.
I decided to write a plot, and I asked my brother to help me with some plot twists. We wrote it and then sent it for that contest… and nothing happened!Later, I decided to do something with this scenario. I started working on the characters, added more of them, intertwined some cases from my personal experience into it… and again, nothing. I am honestly still working on it. And I hope that one day I will finish it and someone in Hollywood would make a movie based on it)))
Then I wrote some fairy tales for my children. I added some morals into them too) Then there were a lot of book translations, and I did not write much.
But once, I had a horrible and weird dream, so I decided to write it down, and it turned into a readable story. As any other author, I guess, I have a lot of unfinished stories too… But as we all dream that one day, one of my books will become a bestseller and I’ll wake up famous.
My short stories might not be very popular or smash hit, but I write about some things that I experienced myself, and I think some readers will “dig them”. I think that writing is all about observation and then the
ability to put it in the correct forms of words.
