Blog Moves To “Prem Rao, Story Teller.”

We are moving! This blog effective January 7, 2014 will now be available at Prem Rao, Story Teller. This move is prompted by my attempt to consolidate all my blog posts relating to books, writing, book reviews etc in one location. Thank you for following my posts, and I hope you will continue to do so at the new site.

More on Querying

If you want to see your novel published, the querying process is one of the first challenges that you need to deal with effectively. I don’t have the numbers, and the estimates I have read vary so much that it’s difficult to pin the number of queries literary agents receive every day.  I do know for sure they add up to a huge number. Irrespective of this number, the fact remains that the query determines whether your book project will proceed to the next stop or not. Here are a few posts from experts to supplement what I had written some days ago in a post:  “On Querying”.

“Devnaa’s India:Delicious Vegetarian Home Cooking & Street Food”

“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.

“Christmas Mysteries”

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.

The Best of American Magazine Writing

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.

“The Best Of American Magazine Writing, 2013” from the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) in collaboration with the Columbia University Press, makes for interesting reading. The Editor in Chief of The Atlantic, James Bennett and Sid Holt, Chief Executive of the ASME deserve credit for having put together such an interesting anthology. As the name suggests, this is an annual compendium of the best articles written in different magazines which cover a wide variety of subjects from politics to stories of human interest. They cover works of public interest, reporting, feature writing, and fiction. Many of these articles have been adjudged winners in the National Magazine awards.

First up you read a fascinating article which first appeared in The Atlantic, “Fear Of A Black President” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. After all Barack Obama made history when he was elected the 44th President of the United States. Sure, he was one of the few African-Americans to graduate from Columbia University and the Harvard Law School, but how would he fare as the President in very demanding times?

I was delighted to find a short story by Stephen King, “Batman and Robin Have An Altercation” from Harper’s. I have admired his writing over the years. Most of all, I am grateful to King for his little book on Writing.

Some of the others which stayed in my mind (and perhaps indicate my areas of particular interest) are:

• “Did You Think About The Six People You Executed” by Robert F. Worth of the New York Times in ‘Reporting.”
• “Ten Days Inside The Mansion- and the Mind- of Kim Dotcom, the Most Wanted Man on the Internet, by Charles Graeber in Wired.
• “The Innocent Man” by Pamela Colloff, in Texas Monthly in the category of Feature Writing incorporating Profile Writing.

If you want to gift someone with thought-provoking yet interesting reading for the festive season, why don’t you consider “The Best of American Magazine Writing, 2013 ?”

 

 

So, What Exactly Do You Write?

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.

On Querying

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.

Manreet S. Someshwar’s latest. Also Writers on Writing.

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.”

After Effects of NaNoWriMo

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.

“Obedience Unto Death” for NaNoWriMo 2013

In this blog you will find quite a number of posts on NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) the last one was about NaNoWriMo being like a game of golf. As you might expect, I am participating in NaNoWriMo once again this year.