“Devnaa’s India: Delicious Vegetarian Home Cooking & Street Food” by Roopa Rawal will be a welcome addition to the cookbook collection in the kitchen book shelf of those in the UK and elsewhere who are developing a new-found taste for Indian vegetarian cuisine. Continue reading ““Devnaa’s India:Delicious Vegetarian Home Cooking & Street Food””
Author: Prem Rao
Author, Blogger, Book Reviewer, Coach, and Podcaster
With Christmas very much in the air, it was fitting that my reading took me to “Christmas Mysteries: Ten Excerpts To Set The Season” put together by Open Road Integrated Media. There’s something about excerpts that you may have noticed. If, like me, you enjoy mysteries, stories incomplete and the scope to figure out for yourself what happened before or after that excerpt, you will enjoy reading them. If you don’t, while they make for good reading in any case, excerpts can be annoying as you find yourself wanting more with the excerpt ending just as you got hooked to it. Continue reading ““Christmas Mysteries””
To tell you the truth as a kid, it was my ambition to become a journalist. I would have loved to have become one but in the India of the ’60s and ’70s where I grew up, it wasn’t considered to be a hot career. At least that was the case in my family. I have loved and followed magazine writing over the years. As a writer myself, I have often felt the short, terse sentences and the pace of the articles written in magazines call for special skills. Some of these are quite different from those you would need for a long novel, though basic elements of good writing would undoubtedly remain the same. Continue reading “The Best of American Magazine Writing”
Before I became a writer, I was a reader and a voracious one at that. It meant grabbing any book that caught your fancy and reading it primarily for your enjoyment. It didn’t matter one bit whether or not I knew which genre it belonged to. As a kid, I loved thrillers, mystery novels, crime stories and stories about the wars. This kind of grew on me over the years. It was probably inevitable that when I became a writer, I would try to write stories of the kind I loved to read. Continue reading “So, What Exactly Do You Write?”
It has virtually become mandatory for an author these days to have a website. Some of them are extremely well done while many others indicate that this is something the author is struggling and coming to grips with, something he/she doesn’t know too much about. Simon Appleby, director of digital agency Bookswarm lists his “Ten Author Websites That Really Do The Business” in this article in The Writing Platform. Continue reading “How Good Is Your Author’s Website?”
As mentioned earlier, I am in the process of querying for my third thriller, “Let The Dead Stay Dead.” As always it has been a hugely educative experience. I had the opportunity to see many interesting websites and blogs of literary agents and was totally lost in the wealth of knowledge and perspectives found there. This is by no means a comprehensive list. I am only mentioning top of the mind a few points that have stayed with me. Continue reading “On Querying”
If someone asks you in India, ” Where are your books available?” “You can order them online at Flipkart,” is a safe answer. Both my thrillers, “It Can’t Be You” and ” Lucky For Some, 13″ are available on Flipkart, indeed as they are on Amazon India and elsewhere.
Manreet Sodhi Someshwar’s latest novel, ” The Hunt for Kohinoor” (Westland, 2013) is slated to be released in mid-December 2013. As is common these days, you can pre-order this at Flipkart. This, if I am not mistaken, is a sequel to her earlier book, “The Taj Conspiracy” which was very interesting. I loved her first book, “The Long Walk Home,” which was set in the Punjab at the time of the Partition. My best wishes go out to Manreet. May ” The Hunt For Kohinoor” be a super hit!
Many people have the urge to write and write well. However, not everyone makes the grade. In this context, I liked this blog post by Maria Popova in Brainpickings called, “9 Books on Reading and Writing.” With gems from authors like Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King, this post points you to books that can transform your writing.
A few extracts:
- Anne Lamott in ” Bird By Bird, A Few Instructions on Writing and Life,”
“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
- Stephen King in his classic, “On Writing:A Memoir of the Craft”
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
- Ernest Hemingway in ” Ernest Hemingway On Writing”
” The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.”
The good news is that my third thriller, “Let The Dead Stay Dead” is now ready for publication. Now that NaNoWriMo is over for 2013, and in all modesty let me say that I completed it successfully for the 5th consecutive year, my focus shifts to bringing this project to a fruitful finish. Continue reading ““Let The Dead Stay Dead” Ready for Publication”
This morning I wrote a blog post on my recent effort in the National Novel Writing Month aka NaNoWriMo. I mentioned how thrilled I was to complete it successfully for the fifth successive year.
In this post I wish to dwell on the after effects:)
- What you seee before you id the editied version. (sic) Nothing proves a point more than a demonstration. What I meant to key in was, “What you see before you is the edited version.” Yes, banging away thousands of words per day with a tight deadline does that to you, at least it does that to me. Many typographical errors erupt like a particularly severe attack of acne as your mind works faster than your fingers can fly. Your mind has moved on to the next sentence while your fingers can barely keep up. Therefore you have, as per my theory, so many typos. It takes a while for you to slow down. A while before you get back the accuracy of your keying in which has become a casualty in your recently acquired quest for speed.
- There’s also a void in your life. Seriously. For one whole month NaNoWriMo took over your schedules and grabbed the highest priority. Several other assignments remained incomplete, others fell by the wayside while you focused on attaining your goal to write 50,000 words during the month of November. Now you need to pick up the projects you looked away from, those that emerge as being high priority now that the frenetic activity of NaNoWriMo is over. Believe me, you do feel kind of lost for the first few days. But do write a bit every day. That’s the discipline that NaNoWriMo teaches you, which can stay with you for the rest of your life.
- You haven’t written those 50,000 + words just for the heck of it. You will do your best, I am sure, to complete the novel in all respects. It means a huge amount of work now that you have laid the foundation for your novel. The editing, the fine tuning, the building up of your NaNo Novel starts now. But wait. I would recommend you take a break. Set it aside for a month or so, then come back to it afresh. You will see it differently. You will pick up from where you left off.
In my experience, after NaNoWriMo it takes anywhere between one to two years to get your novel published. So when people say, ” You completed NaNoWriMo successfully? Oh, wow! When and where do we turn up for the book launch?” You need to take a deep breath and say NaNoWriMo was just the start. You have heaps to do before that novel sees the light of day as a published book.
My best wishes to you for your effort to get that NaNo novel published.
Prem Rao : Stories from a Story Teller 