“Inside IB and RAW” by K. Sankaran Nair

I just completed “Inside IB and RAW” by K. Sankaran Nair, the former Head of India’s external intelligence agency RAW and a former Indian High Commissioner to Singapore. I grabbed this book with eager anticipation as I love reading about spies and the like and I thought Sankaran Nair was best qualified to write about it considering the title of the book.

Interviews with Authors

I am one now myself, a published author but even before this I was fascinated by the world of authors. To tell you the truth, though I was a voracious reader since childhood I had never ever met an author in person. In the flesh, so to say.

Re-discovering Goodreads

Since the last couple of days I have been busy: re-discovering Goodreads! Here’s how it works. 

When my debut novel, “It Can’t Be You” was published in November 2010, I had visited Goodreads. I later signed up too, but honestly didn’t explore it adequately. In retrospect, I should have. my advice to new authors in particular would be to make the best of the many features Goodreads provides you as a published author, and that too for free.

I am no expert and I am still finding my feet here. I discovered to start with that “It Can’t Be You” was attributed to “.Prem Rao”. The additional “.” that preceded my name ( God knows how it got there) prevented me from adding this book to my author list. I re-created a spot for the book. I may have lost the ratings for the book but it means more to me to have all my books in one place under my name, which is “Prem Rao.”

Having always been a voracious reader especially of books relating to the military, spy stuff as well as mystery and thrillers, I was delighted to spot some of my all-time favourite books. I have marked them as “read” but I must confess I first read many of them not recently but decades ago. I was flooded with memories as I saw the familiar titles by those familiar names. they influenced my writing, no doubt about that. Some of my favourite authors over time: John Masters, Ian Fleming, Alistair MacLean, Harold Robbins, Paul Brickhill….the list goes on and on.

Just a month ago, my second thriller, “Lucky For Some, 13” was published. As an author, I am very interested to get feedback on how my books have been received. So if you have liked my books, do rate them and leave a comment on Goodreads, as I have started doing for many of the books I have read. It could be of use to someone somewhere!

 

Editing “Let The Dead Stay Dead”

A writing project I am currently engaged in is the editing of my third thriller, “Let The Dead Stay Dead.” I found it quite fascinating to return to this manuscript which had been put on the back burner in October 2012. You may recall that I had written the first 50,000 words for “Let The Dead Stay Dead” during NaNoWriMo of 2011.

Now reading…

Do you read one book at a time or do you, like me, read several simultaneously? I finished Juggi Bhasin’s  “The Terrorist” last week. It was an excellent read. Since I love thrillers and write them myself, I found it gripping. It was full of gory detail and was gruesome but it held the reader right through, which is what a good book ought to do. Congratulations, Juggi. It was a wonderful to read “The Terrorist.”