Time to add another candle to the cake. It’s another thing that the cake might bake itself with the heat from those 2,000 candles. Speaking of cakes—that’s three cakes in three sentences (well, four)—it’s a homemade one this year, baked by my father. Not enough space for 39 candles, though. It’s a different birthday in […]
Reviews #3, #4, #5: The Tamanna Trilogy
I met the author Andaleeb Wajid at Bookaroo in Delhi last November and was most excited to find that she had written a time-travel series. We got talking, with me hoping I could pinch an idea or two on how to get my Satin series out of the time-travel mess I’ve created, but then I […]
Year 2014 in blogging
How popular was Writeside.net in 2014? Well, now that I have the Jetpack plugin, I get to see all sorts of stats without doing much of the hard work that it needed earlier. Turns out, 2014 saw over 7,000 visitors from no less than 106 countries! It’s quite likely a lot of people ended up […]
Review #2: Queen of Ice
It’s a bit early in the year to be cheating, but what the heck. So what if this isn’t a review written specifically for Writeside.net? I worked really hard on it for GoodBooks. The book in question is Devika Rangachari’s Queen of Ice. The easiest way to make a teenager disappear is probably to hiss […]
Review #1: Nirmala and Normala
We all know how much Bollywood loves the twins-separated-at-birth story line and we’ve all taken perverse pleasure from these movies. So when a couple of writers team up to poke some fun at it, the result is a hilarious juxtaposition of reel and real life. The author–illustrator team of Sowmya Rajendran and Niveditha Subramaniam are […]
52 reviews of 2015
Last year’s blogging project was a success, enough to ensure that Writeside.net got some traffic, made enough money to cover hosting bills and kept me writing. Thus, it’s no surprise that I’m all excited about flagging off another blogging project for 2015. Yep, you’re right—this year it’s all going to be about reviews. The original […]
Week #52: Goodbye 2014
Fifty-two weeks of reading and writing have flown by—I can hardly believe it! It was mostly fun, sometimes tiresome and sometimes desperate, but what counts are those 52 blog posts, one for each week of 2014. It is the time of the year when I like to look back and start thinking of my goals […]
Week #51: Five writing styles to try
Making plans is easy; it’s carrying them out that’s the hard part. But what would be the fun in never making plans at all? So here’s another of my lists of things to try some day—in this case, writing styles/options/whatever to attempt. Collaboration Albeit the collaborative effort that was Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean […]
Week #50: Slightly Burnt in the media
Slightly Burnt has been getting more media attention than any of my earlier books. Truth be told, this is mostly because it happens to address issues that are being talked about around the country right now. It’s also thanks to the definite strides young adult literature has been making in India over the years, with […]
Week #49: Blog plans for 2015
It’s Week #49 already and I can’t believe 52 Weeks of Reading and Writing has been (more or less) a success, even though trying to to co-opt a couple of other bloggers didn’t quite work out. However, I’m pleased—and somewhat surprised—to report that I managed to stick to my own weekly schedule, apart from a […]