The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency happens to be one such book. Detailing the adventures of the unconventional, intuitive, unflappable Mma Ramotswe, proprietor of the agency, this is the first in a series of eleven books. This is also the book that has, at long last, kicked me into adding to Writeside.net’s reviews section.

Here’s a teaser from the review:

Precious Ramotswe is about as unlikely a private detective as you would expect — indeed “the only lady private detective in Botswana”. None of the slick smarts of the Kinsey Milhones and Kate Brannigans of the world. That’s not to say that Mma Ramotswe is lacking in the intelligence department. Oh no… she is an extremely sharp and resourceful woman, and her Daddy would have been proud of her today if he had been alive to see her.

Read the rest here, but don’t forget to come back to comment.

~PD

Scholastic’s Spooky Stories has my contribution called “Mirror-Self”, which is about a young girl who discovers her grandmother’s creepy secret. In addition, it has eight other stories, from Anshumani Ruddra, Nilanjana Roy, Arunava Sinha and others.

The Puffin Book of Spooky Ghost Stories, edited by Jerry Pinto, is of course from Penguin’s children’s imprint, Puffin. It has illustrious names such as Ruskin Bond, Jerry Pinto, Subhadra Sen Gupta and Paro Anand. There are thirteen horrific tales in this collection, and “Virus Here” is the title of my story, about an 11-year-old who finds a little surprise lurking in her new laptop.

Check them out if you can. Targeted at the age group 10 and above, you’re never really too old for a nice little scare, are you? Chills down the spine are good for health!

~PD

The Secret of Vakker is the first book in the series (hopefully!) titled Five and Satin. Here’s a short synopsis.

Tasil’s privileged birth makes her heir to the Marik family’s title, and her future is mapped out before her. Just 14 and about to enter the Academy of the Flame to train as a mage, Tasil is expected to take over the reins at Marik from her mother in the years to come. But the headstrong young woman is drawn to trouble like a moth to a flame.

Meanwhile, her older brother Kinnel has been pleasantly surprised to find that his late grandfather who hated him has bequeathed him his precious journals and artefacts from his travels to the North Lands. His curiosity is further piqued when he finds that none of the writing on the mysterious artefacts makes any sense to him, which is odd given that Kinnel is a talented word mage. As he considers a trip to the North Lands, he asks Tasil to accompany him.

Kinnel, Tasil and their friends’ search leads them to a mysterious North Land estate where they tumble into a remote, surreal world that blurs their own perceptions of reality. Who is the ageless woman Minar and what secrets does she hide behind her enigmatic smile? Is there a reason behind her reclusive existence? Where does she get the money to manage her vast estate?

Magic is forbidden in the North Lands, and mages are despised and distrusted there. Yet as Kinnel and Tasil unfurl the secrets of long-forgotten Northish magic, little do they realize how their own futures are wound with it.

Provided I finish writing it on time, The Secret of Vakker ought to be out in April 2010. Watch this space for updates.

~PD

For those of you in Delhi, this appeared in the Indian Express on Monday, 10 August 2009. It’s in Newsline on page 6. For those without access to Express, including me, sadly, here’s a little glimpse:

~PD

After months of blood, sweat and toil, The Timeless Land’s cover has been finalized and it looks like we’ll be rolling out soon. Just to recap — yes, it has been a long time and you’re forgiven for having forgotten — the Shadow in Eternity series consists of:

• Book 1: A Shadow in Eternity
• Book 2: The Key of Chaos
• Book 3: The Timeless Land

Hoping to be back very soon with news of the book being out! Meanwhile, what do you think is going to happen? Who will die and who will live?

~PD

Ideally one would like to describe a “fling” as an uncomplicated roll in the hay, but the sad truth is that one finds fictional characters fling-able because one is attracted to them in various ways that makes one find “potential” in them, as one friend puts it. And this truth is a sad one because these wonderful people we lust after are just a figment of someone else’s imagination, and ne’er the twain shall meet!

Which makes us challenge participants a sadder lot, but that’s besides the point. So here goes in alphabetical order:

1. Miranda Bailey: Of course, everyone knows and loves Dr Bailey of Grey’s Anatomy, that sarcastic, no-nonsense resident at Seattle Grace Hospital who is nicknamed “the Nazi” by her interns. Portrayed brilliantly by Chandra Wilson, Bailey would be horrified to hear that she is completely cute! If I’d been ranking this list, she’d be near the top.
2. Laura Holt:Portrayed by actor Stephanie Zimbalist, Laura Holt is the brains (you could say the brawn too) behind the Remington Steele detective agency in the series Remington Steele. She is strong, intelligent, resourceful, sensitive, with a dash of daring and a flair for finding herself in the middle of the excitement.
3. Edgar Wield: Sergeant Wield is a character in Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe series of books. It has been televised as well, but it is the book character I refer to. Wield is ugly as sin, but has a heart of gold and a brain like a computer. He is also uncompromisingly gay, but this is my fantasy, right? (Read a profile of Wield.)
4. Dana Scully: There is no other way of putting it—Scully makes me go weak all over! And I love her logic and her need to explain and understand everything.
5. Spock: It is probably every Trekkie’s fantasy to break through Spock’s icy countenance, and I am no different. That raised eyebrow and those pointy ears have kept him on my list since I was a teenager. The only question that bothers me slightly is, does being with a half-Vulcan mean I’ll be getting some only once every seven years? Just as well I have all these other people on the list…
6. Barbara Havers: Right… now this is one that might surprise people who have read the Inspector Lynley novels. (Once again, there’s a tele-series, but I refer to the books.) Scruffy, unpredictable, abrasive—there seems nothing likeable about Sergeant Havers of New Scotland Yard. But beneath the rough exterior is a sad and lost soul that brings out the protective best (or worst!) in me. She is also a smoker, which would otherwise really put me off, but for some reason the completely ordinary and extremely flawed Havers has always attracted me.
7. Judge Gray:Judge Amy Gray from Judging Amy is a single parent living with her own mother. A family court judge, Judge Gray often called upon to make tough decisions that change lives. Despite being a strong and inspiring figure, she has a certain vulnerability about her that I find very endearing.
8. Mark Darcy:This is the Mr Darcy from Bridget Jones’s Diary as portrayed by the lovely Colin Firth, of course. No explanations required. And he’s rich too! (He’s also the only reasonably good-looking male on my list. I wonder why.)
9. The Ninth Doctor:The Doctor has a time machine, and he can take me to wherever and whenever I want—heck, who wouldn’t sleep with him? But it’s the Ninth incarnation played by Christopher Eccleston that I’m particularly interested in—the “northern” accent, those sticky-out ears and long nose… oh yes, make place for yet another ugly guy on my list!
10. Toshiko Sato: Sweet and nice and lost. That’s what describes Toshiko Sato (actor Naoko Mori) of TV series Torchwood completely. A complete geek, but with a sad and murky past, Tosh has also always been very unfortunate in matters of romance, and therefore is due a change!

And, finally:

(Also ran:: Captain Jack Harkness: I want to want to have a fling with Captain Jack of Doctor Who and Torchwood, but I just don’t see it happening. I admire his openness in matters of sex and sexuality, and the way he is unrestrained by the trappings of 21st-century [patriarchal?] perceptions of right and wrong. I think I am more attracted to his 51st-century morals than the man himself!)

So, that’s all folks… Well, in fact, not really. That’s only all the names I can think of right now. And, by the way, Swapna, you have been tagged!

~PD

The Man on the Balcony is the third book in the Martin Beck series by this husband–wife team. The series is so-called because it features a Stockholm-based police detective of the same name as the central character, even though his colleagues appear to get just as much print-space.

Without further ado, read the review. More will follow as soon as I am able to get hold of the other books.

~PD

For those of you who’ve forgotten — or don’t know — what the books are about, here’s a quick recap:

1. A Shadow in Eternity
2. The Key of Chaos
3. The Timeless Land

Now, I do have some options for a series title, which follow, but please feel free to suggest anything else.

1. The Sands of Time Trilogy: My publisher really likes this, but I am not completely sure about it. The first thing it brings to mind is the Longfellow poem about leaving behind footprints on the sands of time.
2. The Halvard Series: Too generic? What if I write more books with the same setting? Will it confuse readers?
3. The Halvard Castle Trilogy.
4. Maya.
5. The Ai’diyar Prophecy: To-the-point, leaving the option to write more on the same characters later on with no chance of confusion. However, the word “prophecy” may be misleading in the context of the books…
6. A Shadow in Eternity: This is what I unofficially call it; in my MS the second and third books are titled, A Shadow in Eternity II: The Key of Chaos and A Shadow in Eternity III: The Timeless Land.
7. Anything else?

All comments and suggestions will be much appreciated.

~PD

“I want not to have killed a person.”

Maya Subramaniam’s life is arguably far more complex than the average fourteen-year-old’s. As the youngest Halvard of the Sands of Time, torn between loyalty to her family and to her Watcher, and dogged by a prophecy that predicts her to be the cause of the destruction of time… Honestly, how much can one person take?

An adolescent caught in a world of grown-ups, Maya finds herself in the middle of a Warrior conspiracy to see the Ai’diyar Prophecy to its conclusion. Homeless and confused, convinced that she wrecks the lives of those she loves, Maya finds herself doubting her ability to see right from wrong.

As she and her friends stumble into the Timeless Land, she is faced with a choice that could have a devastating impact on reality as we know of it. In this third and final book of the Halvard series, Maya finally comes face to face with the Prophecy.

The question is, will it be an end or a beginning?

(Read about the previous books: A Shadow in Eternity and The Key of Chaos).

~PD

The chances are, we have all unwittingly been involved in a fandom or dozen at some point or other. For me, since being a nerdy kid who read three books in two days, fandoms have, ironically, helped in hanging on to a semblance of sanity at times. Maybe a healthy dose of un-reality is the best medicine when one needs to get away in one’s mind. In fact, I would go so far as to say that being involved in a range of fandoms was critical in my choice of career. Whether what was right or wrong is another issue!

All things Enid Blyton

Frighteningly enough, it was the wholly inappropriate Enid Blyton books that saw me through childhood and early adolescence, and first made me question if I could be a writer. By the age of 6 or 7, I was totally into the Five Find-Outers and Famous Five; I wanted to be one of them. Soon I was going on make-believe adventures with Roger, Diana, Barney and Snubby; hanging out with Jack, Nora, Peggy and Mike in their secret island; or off with Phillip, Dinah, Jack and Lucy-Ann on an exotic vacation… Yes, well, I hear people coughing “obsession” about now! Hey, we moved a lot and I didn’t have many friends…

I must add that even as a child I found Enid Blyton disturbing and now that I think of it, given the sexism, xenophobia and (I can’t think of a better phrase) the bourgeois elitism, it isn’t something I would like to see children reading. People think that kids don’t see a lot of things, but some kids do. At least I did, and a lot of my contemporaries did too.

Star Trek

Sets made of plastic toys, William Shatner’s overacting, Captain Kirk getting it on with a different woman each week… honestly, it isn’t hard to see the detractors’ point of view. Sometimes, I get a nagging doubt about whether I really love Star Trek, or just fell in love with a pointy-eared half-alien.

ST: TOS has its share of critics, but it must be admitted that it was revolutionary in its own way. For the 1960s it was quite bold — featuring one of the first inter-racial kisses on TV — and touched upon a number of ethical issues that will hopefully remain timeless. That said, despite the imagination and vision employed by creator Gene Roddenberry, it is also an excellent example of how present-day values constrict our ability to imagine the future. The final episode, called “Turnabout Intruder”, showed a female Star Fleet officer taking over Kirk’s body because she had a compelling wish to command a starship, and in the 23rd century women are not allowed to hold command! Roddenberry expressed regret for inclusion of that idea later on, but generations of fantasy writers should thank him, because it gives us an excellent lesson in going where no-one has gone before.

Sport

Most of the significant relationships in my life have revolved around sport. The two games that I especially love are cricket and football, and was lucky enough to have gained a nuanced understanding of both rather than being limited to one of winning or losing. Lately, mainly due to a discontent with the way cricket is portrayed in the media and managed by the powers-that-be, I seem to be getting increasingly out of touch. However, I know it will take very little to get me back into it. I can still pick up, say, Stephen Waugh’s autobiography and smile when I read about something that I remember seeing or listening to (radio) or reading about.

I got into cricket at the age of 10 or so, and had a short and undistinguished stint as a medium pacer for my college in my late teens; football was a later development. I had always liked it, but it was the late 1990s/early 2000s that English and European football started getting beamed live into our living rooms. Doing the Goalpost was also a lot of fun. I miss it.

Remington Steele, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files

Only laziness and the fact that this post is getting longer than I anticipated that made me club these three together. I was into each of these series at different times, and they were all very different. While Buffy and X-Files fall into the SFF genre, Remington Steele was a detective series. It was aired in the 1980s, though we got to see it in the mid-1990s, when I was in my late teens. It all began when a private investigator called Laura Holt set up her own agency, but let’s hear it in her own words:

Try this for a deep dark secret: The great detective Remington Steele… He doesn’t exist. I invented him. Follow: I’d always loved excitement, So I studied and apprenticed, and put my name on an office. But absolutely no one knocked on my door. A female private investigator seemed so… feminine. So I invented a superior. A decidedly masculine superior. Suddenly there were cases around the block. It was working like a charm. Until the day he walked in, with his blue eyes and mysterious past. And before I knew it, he assumed Remington Steele’s identity. Now I do the work, and he takes the bows. It’s a dangerous way to live, But as long as people buy it, I can get the job done. We never mix business with pleasure. Well…almost never. I don’t even know his real name!

Pierce Brosnan, with his blue eyes and rougish smile, really wormed his way into our impressionable teenage hearts as Mr Steele. And Laura was pretty great too. The mystery about who Steele really was, and the tension between him and Laura kept us entertained for years, and we pretended all the unpleasantness that existed behind the scenes never existed. I’m sure I’ve seen all 94 episodes, and all of them more than once.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the next serial I really got into. To be honest, I’ve not seen much of Joss Whedon’s work apart from this, though have heard a lot of good things. I have to admit part of why I like him is that he identifies himself as a feminist, which is clearly visible from his work. His whole idea for a feisty young woman kicking ass (why is it “kicking arse” doesn’t have the same ring?) came out of the fact that he hated how the blonde is always doomed in horror movies. Well, not only did Buffy provide a great role model for young people, there were a number of interesting characters in the series, not to mention a pace and excitement that kept the plot going for a long time till — like all good things — it started to unravel.

As for The X-Files, well, what can I say, I absolutely and totally devoured it. It was the first time I seriously wondered about what went on in the making of a story like this, and did a lot of reading up on Chris Carter. I was intrigued by his work, and also watched Millennium while it aired here. (I wrote a loooooong essay on Carter, The X-Files and the then-upcoming Millennium in my entrance examination for MCRC, Jamia! I don’t know what they made of it, but I did get an interview call, which I bunked.) I always had a softer spot for Scully than for Spooky Mulder, and was often annoyed that her perspective got repeatedly steamrolled. To be honest, the later seasons ended up “jumping too many sharks” and got a little bit pointless and boring, but I’m hoping for good things from the upcoming movie, I Want to Believe.

The Wheel of Time

When it comes to books, I know that I belong to innumerable fandoms, but the Wheel of Time has a special place. People might complain about the one-dimensional main characters, too many side characters, the needlessly meandering plot, Robert Jordan’s style of writing, the similarities to LOTR, and, heck, even blame Jordan for dying before finishing the series… but such criticisms are commonplace for any work of fiction of this massive a scale. Jordan never denied being influenced by Tolkien, and frankly, I like his style of writing. I found the humour in the early books almost “British”, and that’s the highest praise I can give!

Apart from the fact that it is an amazing work of literature, and opened the doors to the wonderful world of fantasy for me, there are two other reasons why WoT is special. The first of course is that it is what made me decide exactly what I wanted to write about. I’d been meandering about writing fiction seriously for a few years, and had a lot of aborted attempts. After reading The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, and The Shadow Rising in quick succession, I KNEW I was going to write fantasy. I know my first book has a similarity to EoTW in its basic plot, and I’m not ashamed. There was an acknowledgement to RJ in that book.

The other reason is that I met a lot of people because of WoT, through the forum Moiraine’s World. (Oh, I can imagine Marie preening here…!) It was the first time I ventured into the world of online socializing, and I certainly don’t regret it. It’s been fun and annoying and amazing and a lot of other things all at the same time, and “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world”!

Doctor Who, Torchwood and Russell T. Davies

I still remember that evening when Swapna was being a total pain with those Doctor Who DVDs. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic, but she left them on my table and said, “Try and watch them.” I did, and I can’t believe I was such a fool as to ever wonder if I’d be interested! Fine, so the Doctor I liked better left the show; fine, that most of the plots are thin to the point of emaciation. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t — it’s unadulterated fun, some typical British humour, lots of aliens, lots of running, some cool gadgets… oh, I love it!

The Ninth Doctor of the 2005 series was my favourite, but the stories in that season were mostly… um… bad, apart from the whole “Bad Wolf” story arc. Series two and the coming of David Tennant seemed to take things up a notch. Given my fascination with other kinds of fantasy, it touched a peak with the two episodes “The Impossible Planet” and “Satan’s Pit”, though “The Girl in the Fireplace” was a super episode too. Series three was very up and down, but the ups were very high indeed, with episodes like “Shakespeare Code”, “Blink”, “Human Nature”/”Family of Blood”, and the first two of a three-part finale.

Torchwood is a Doctor Who spin-off, very dark and aimed at an adult audience, especially with its in-your-face violence. It features one of the Doctor’s companions, the immortal Captain Jack Harkness. While Torchwood is undoubtedly a little thin in the class department at times, it has its moments. It also has an excellent cast, playing the roles of sweet, nerdy Tosh, sarcastic Owen, let-me-fall-all-over-you-Captain-Jack Gwen (okay, that’s mean, but I don’t care!), and the efficient Ianto for whom the term “still waters run deep” seem to have been invented.

Can’t talk about DW and TW without mentioning creator Russell T. Davies, best known for Queer as Folk before DW came back on air. I intend to write about him in detail later, so just saying here that I love how versatile he is. If only he hadn’t written that wholly regrettable episode called “Partners in Crime” for DW: Series Four (2008)…

Gaming

Oh dear… this is getting out of hand now…

Very briefly, more or less in descending order of how much I like them: Deus Ex, The Sims 2, Hitman, Diablo (all), Jedi Outcast, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, various football management games, Prince of Persia (the original; the first game I got hooked on, in the mid-1990s)… and more.

Reginald Hill and Ian Rankin

Arguably, among the the best writers of crime fiction plying their trade at the moment. With Hill it is his Dalziel (pronounced Dee-ell) and Pascoe series, based in Yorkshire; and with Rankin the Inspector Rebus books, based in Edinburgh. Both have been made into TV series. Will not get into too much detail, but suffice it to say that while Hill is a master at wordplay, Rankin’s characterization is superlative. Both are excellent narrators, though neither have been able to reproduce the same sort of form with their other works. (For reviews of most of Hill’s books.)

Right, so before I can think of anything else that will make this post even longer, it’s time to wind up!

~PD