Book Reading for iBrowse

I was delighted to accept an invitation to do a book reading for members of iBrowse, a book lovers club in Bangalore, India where I live. They have a laudable system where they invite authors to speak about their books.

Later, in a month or so, after members have had the chance to read the book, they invite the author once again for a book discussion. I attended the meeting on October 17, where I sat in on the closing moments of an animated discussion the members were having with Vikram Sampath, on his book “My Name Is Gauhar Jaan.”

Soon it was my turn and I spoke about how “It Can’t Be You” came out of my effort in the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)  2009. I was proud of the fact that I was the first person from out of India to have a debut novel published following a debut attempt at NaNoWriMo.

With NaNoWriMo 2011 around the corner,  I encouraged them to have a shot at it. The experience is wonderful and enriching even if you don’t actually write 50,000 words of your novel in the calendar month of November.

I spoke of how my psychological thriller sits at the intersection of my passion for psychology and the military. I read out extracts of ICBY to give them a flavour of the book and its characters. This brought back memories of Colonel Belliappa, Shefali, Pritam and Elena, since I was the guy who created these characters. I hope they will enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing it.