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.
Blog Moves To “Prem Rao, Story Teller.”
January 7, 2014
Uncategorized new address for blog, Prem Rao, Story Teller Leave a comment
The Best of American Magazine Writing
December 19, 2013
Book Reviews, Books ASME, Columbia University Press, magazine writing, Stephen King Leave a comment
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?
December 19, 2013
Resources for Writers, Trends commercial fiction, literary fiction, mainstream fiction 1 Comment
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. More
After Effects of NaNoWriMo
November 27, 2013
General NaNoWriMo 2013, publishing your novel 2 Comments
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
November 19, 2013
NaNoWriMo alternate history, NaNoWriMo, Nazi Germany Leave a comment
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.