Top Indian Blogs 2012-13

I am delighted to find ” Writing To Be Read” listed amongst the Top Indian Blogs for 2012-13. This is a listing of 541 best blogs in English about India/by Indians. This blog has given me great pleasure as I share thoughts, experiences and links about books, authors and the craft of writing. This is just the start, there is so much more to be done.

Have You Heard Of The Diagram Prize?

Until this morning, I hadn’t. That is I hadn’t heard of the Diagram Prize. A small item in today DNA newspaper caught my attention. It said “Judge The Book By It’s Title.” It went on to speak of an annual award run by the trade magazine, The Bookseller for the oddest title of the year. Apparently, in the race for this year’s award are titles like, ” Was Hitler Ill”, “How Tea Cosies Changed The World”, and “Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop.”

5 Tips For A Great Book Launch

Does this sound like the title of a best-selling book on how to make your book launch a terrific success? I just thought of this title as I get down to plan for the launch of my next book, a thriller once again, called, “Lucky For Some, 13.”  What better way to think of all that you have to do to make the launch a great success than to write about it?

Formal Launch of “Only Men Please”

In an earlier post, I wrote about an anthology of short stories from Unisun Publications called ” Only Men Please.” The book was formally launched on March 31, at a very well-attended function at The British Library at Bangalore.  Annie Chandy Mathew and Meenakshi Varma, the people behind Unisun did a splendid job in arranging the function. Jagdish Raja, Shreekumar Varma , Mathew Vincent Menacherry and Jyoti Makhija read out extracts from some of the 35 short stories that make up this book.

After the book launch, we had an interesting debate. The topic being:  “Do Men and Women Differ From Each Other In Their Writing?” Three writers whose short stories appear in the anthology represented the male viewpoint. They were Bangalore’s eminent theater personality, Jagdish Raja, the well-known Chennai -based writer Shreekumar Varma and Mathew Vincent Menacherry, co-founder and director of the Anthea Group. The women’s viewpoint was presented by a strong team of talented writers: Jahnavi Barua, Shinie Antony and  Malathi Ramachandran. The content of the debate was interesting. Eminent writers, Shashi Deshpande and K R Usha contributed to the debate too, as did many enthusiastic members of the audience.

In my view, the choice of topics and the writing style, to some extent does differ but the hallmark of a great writer is being able to empathize and write from all points of view. If a male writer can describe the feelings and emotions of a female in a story just as well as a woman could, he would have done a great job. The same would be the case if a woman writer could do this about a male character in a story. There are many other aspects to be considered but I guess these very differences make for a wide variety of writing- and debate!

Booker Prize for 2011 Goes To Julian Barnes

Article first published as Booker Prize 2011 Goes To Julian Barnes on Technorati. There was a lot of debate this year about the criteria for judging the winner of the coveted Booker Prize. The results are out and the Booker Prize for 2011 goes to Julian Barnes.

NaNoWriMo 2011

GFG2G4CUKZFE The countdown has begun. The timer at the National Novel Writing Month website showed me when I saw it last that are 27 days 4 hours left for the kick-off.  Starting, November 1, thousands of people from all over the world will set out to write 50,000 words during the calendar month of November 2011. I am as excited as most others would be. 

Camp NaNoWriMo

Better late than never! I am very excited to have signed on for Camp NaNoWriMo. This is, so to say, like a dry run for the NaNoWriMo which takes place in November each year. I wasn’t following NaNo too closely for the last few months and in any case I was on vacation in the US, so I seemed to have missed the early announcements about Camp NaNoWriMo.

Short Story Competition

If you want to hone your writing skills and take part in a short story competition, here’s one that sounds interesting. You can aim to win the New Rose Short Story Prize 2011.

 

Contest on Memoirs

Are you one of those who love memoirs, reading and writing them? If you like writing novels, short stories or personal essays based on autobiographical experiences, here’s one contest you might like to take part in.

Jaipur Literature Festival

Everyone but everyone is speaking of JLF or to the uniatiated  the Jaipur Literature Festival. There are innumerable tweets about it. There are shows on national TV channels and the newspapers have reserved lots of space to report the highlights of this interesting literary feast. It is fast becoming South Asia’s leading literary event. It draws many associated with literature: writers, poets, lyricists, publishers and readers too of course from all parts of the world.