My love of all things Jemma Redgrave led me to the pilot episode of Lewis, a spin-off of the crime series Inspector Morse, based on the books of Colin Dexter. Now, you might wonder what connection all of this has with Jemma Redgrave. Simple: she had a role in the story and I’m currently on […]
Author: Payal
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Monday to Sunday: What I’m watching these days
Every once in a blue moon, a reader stumbles upon my blog. I was reminded of that fact yesterday, which in turn reminded me how neglected Writer’s Log has been lately. What can I say? I’ve been too busy reading, writing and playing games (I’m so close to finishing Thief, Wolfenstein: The New Order and […]
Older and wiser…again
It’s stock-taking-of-the-year time and the only thing I can think of is, 2017 was the year I discovered Berena! Well, in the larger scheme of things, the year that just went by was a horrible one. Right-wing bigots continued to be in power, the digital enslavement of Indian citizens went on, the economy remained effed, […]
Hit for a Six: The middle-of-the-book test
(Criminally late update? Let’s brush that under the carpet, shall we?) Back in 2010, the Guardian suggested the page-99 test to find out if you want to read a book. In short, you read page 99 of the book in question to decide if it’s worth your time. Since my new book, Hit for a […]
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Discovering Frances Hardinge
Most of my August was spent in the brilliant mind of the British children’s and YA author, Frances Hardinge. I’ve been ploughing through her books and marvelling at the sheer brilliance of her imagination. I believe, like the protagonist of the latest book of hers I read, A Face Like Glass, Hardinge too is a […]
Career of Evil — finish or abandon?
Should you review a book you’re not sure you’ll finish? Don’t know the answer to that one, so I just won’t call this a review. To be fair, I wasn’t exactly champing at the bit to read Robert Galbraith’s Career of Evil so I can’t exactly moan about feeling let down. It sort dropped into […]
Why I want you to watch Holby City
**Note: Here be spoilers.** #1 Because representation matters The older I get the less patience I have for stories about men, for men. It doesn’t help that this covers most of TV. This started me on a quest to seek out series featuring women or series that have stories about women (not the same thing). […]
New book alert: A Helping Hand
Back in 2015, I was asked by Vidya Mani if I’d like to do a book on the theme of fitting in for the StoryWeaver open-source repository of stories. She was commissioning a set of books on the broad subject of emotional intelligence. Of course, the answer was yes. The result was A Helping Hand, […]
Gul in Space
In 2016, I worked with Pratham Books’ Storyweaver project to commission a set of STEM books. The aim was to create fun, engaging picture books and illustrated books on various technology and engineering themes that could be used as supplementary to textbooks at the elementary level. Since Pratham works with children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, […]
Wolfenstein: The New Order
There’s a lot of shooting everything in sight in Wolfenstein: The New Order (hereafter W:TNO), plus a decent amount of sneaking about if you so wish, but the overarching attraction of the game for me has been the premise its storyline is based on: What if the Nazis won World War II?