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Lurking Musings

~ Musings of a newly published writer

Lurking Musings

Tag Archives: Neelima Vinod

Writing process questions

26 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Musings

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

books, Gods of the Deep, gods of the sea, Neelima, Neelima Vinod, Ninfa Hayes, paranormal romance, R.A Smith, the writing process, Transitions, writing, Writing Process


Neelima Vinod tagged me in the Writing Process Blog Tour. You may remember Neelima from Vampire Month a few years back and she has since been doing rather well for herself. This meme is an interview meme about the writing process so those of you who are interested may find out more about how I do things… maybe…

 What am I working on?

Well, the official answer has to be ‘shaping the minds of the next generation in the hope of getting them into university’ because at the moment I am mostly working on my day job of teaching. However, you want the writer answer and for that I am doing two things. One is working on the final stages of Gods of the Deep, the sequel to Gods of the Sea. That is with an editor and I have a cover waiting to be revealed which is awesome. The other is editing a selection of my short stories for publication in a collection I am calling Lurking Miscellany in honour of this blog. In addition to those two writing based things, I also have something I only found out about yesterday which I am not allowed to talk about. Which is ironic as it will involve me talking…

 How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I am not sure I am qualified to be able to say my work is different to any others. I’d like to think that it is but I consider that to be a question that readers should answer rather than me. If pushed to answer I would like to say that Transitions differs from many other romance works because of the BBW element. However, there is a whole genre of romance fiction based on that concept. I could also say that Gods of the Sea was either a pirate story set in a fantasy universe or a fantasy story set in something other than the Tolkienesque fantasy setting – either way a slight deviation from cliché. However, many of my influences (such as Barbara Hambly) are writers who have done similar. There is a lot of fantasy out there now which is veering away from the Tolkien influences of my youth and I consider this to be a very good thing.

Why do I write what I do?

I started writing while in school and found that I enjoyed it a lot. However, I never really considered what I wrote as worth publishing and so I mainly did it for fun. Of my current published works, I wrote Transitions because of an interest in both Roman history, specifically the history of the town of my birth, and in the paranormal. Gods of the Sea I wrote because there was a call for submissions for a pirate themed anthology and I had an idea for it which I thought might work.

 How does my writing process work?

Chaotically. In the terminology of the Absolute Write forum, I am definitely a Panster (someone who writes by the seat of their pants) rather than a plotter (someone who carefully plans out the sequence of events in their story). Whenever I tried to write like a Plotter I found I could not do it and I actually think that everyone has their own preferred way of working which fits how their own mind works rather than there being any ‘one true way’. I often get ideas when my body is doing one thing (walking, tidying, etc.) and my mind is free to wander, the only problem is that I rarely get time to sit down and get those ideas down on paper. However, any idea that survives in my mind until I get time to write about it is likely to be one worth keeping while those that don’t I am probably better off losing. I also tend to be encouraged by necessity. Both of my published works have come about because there was a pressing need to get something submitted to a project I wanted to be involved in so I stopped wallowing in uncertainty and just got on with it.

I’ve also worked in different ways for different projects. For Gods of the Sea I basically sat down over Christmas and splurged out most of the story over a couple of days. I was not even aware of what I was writing until I reviewed it later. For Transitions, however, it was a more careful process and for that I had actually started out with the beginnings of two very different stories (an historic romance about a Roman soldier and his dying wife and a contemporary romance set in Birmingham) which I then realised could be merged into one.

 

Thank you Neelima for tagging me! You can read about her process here.

As part of the game, I’m tagging two writers for you to blog hop to.:

R.A Smith is the author of the wonderful Oblivion Storm and its sequel Primal Storm. You can find him on Facebook here.

Ninfa Hayes is the author of Bites and Nannies Inc . You can find her on Goodreads here.

Interview with Neelima Vinod

09 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Guest posts

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

books, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dracula, good poems, greatest weakness, guest blogging, guest posts, Interviews, Neelima Vinod, paranormal romance, poetry books, sense of rhythm, Unsettled, Vampire Month, Vampires, writing, Yakshi


Today we are back with Neelima Vinod, author of the recently released novella, Unsettled. Neelima was originally supposed to be contributing this interview to Vampire month but circumstances conspired and instead she sent us a piece of fiction. I promised her the chance to answer the Vampire month questions when her book finally came out and so here are her answers…70112929-019 copy

1) What is the earliest memory you have of writing? What did you write about?

I remember writing  letters to my grandparents on blue envelopes that doubled as writing paper. I wrote to them at great length about the things that I did and the books I was reading. I wrote poems a great deal as well. When did you decide to become a professional writer? Why did you take this step? After my sons were born. It’s been seven years since I made that decision. I had always chosen to do jobs that had a lot to do with language like editing, and literature, like teaching. But  it was not enough. I needed to write more. So I wrote for magazines and blogs. I worked on writing fiction and poetry that I would like.  I searched a long time for my voice. When I was presented with an opportunity to write a novella last year, it happened easily.

2) What would you consider to be your greatest strength as a writer? What about your greatest weakness? How do you overcome this weakness?

My strength has to be my love for poetry- that gives me a sense of rhythm when I write. The amazing part of the digital age is the immense access you have to poetry. Although poetry books are not flying off the shelves, there are archives and archives of good poems and readings. This ability to read almost any poem out there has opened my world.  My weakness is that I keep editing what I write. That slows my pace. What I try to do now is write continuously without being overburdened by the possibility of change. Yet I keep faltering….

3) Tell us about the place where you live. Have you ever derived any inspiration from your home or from anywhere you have visited?

Well my ebook ‘Unsettled’ is straight out of the place where my ancestors lived. The same hundred roomed house, no ghosts though! I’m romantically attached to Kerala in southern India,  especially my mother’s ancestral homeland. I visit Kerala often and  the images of the sunny green palm studded landscape seem to have seeped into my heart and mind.

4unsettled-200x300) Which book, if any, would you consider to be your greatest influence and inspiration?

Wuthering Heights is a book that I love- it’s the first book about haunted love that held my undivided attention.  The Victorian writers set the stage for the paranormal excesses that we see today.

5) What drove you to write about Vampires?

The story ‘Unsettled’ has a vampire seductress- what is called a yakshi in subcontinental literature. I grew up listening to stories about yakshis- my mother and grandmother are good story tellers. As they spoke about their lives, I lived those lives too and the idea of a yakshi appealed to me a great deal.  A yakshi is normally pictured as insensitive in stories and movies, though she is also worshipped in some parts. The female stereotype irked me a great deal- the idea seemed absurd that a beautiful woman would hang on a tree and devour innocent men who could not help being tempted by their delicious floral scent. The yakshi will make a night of it and then devour the innocent man and leave his nails and hair like trophies for all to see. Why is she so angry? I often wondered. So I decided that my yakshi would be less woman, though she is terribly attractive, and more human.

6) What do you think is the attraction for Vampire fiction? Why is it such a popular topic?

There are so many people in one person- a part of each of us is fascinated by negativity as it is as much a part of life as all things bright and beautiful. People read vampire fiction for thrills- it makes you feel terribly alive when you read it.

7) In a fight between all the greatest Vampires of fiction, who do you think would come out on top?

You can’t beat Count Dracula….he’s a precursor of all the fanged blood suckers that come after.

8) What about in some other contest such as sexiness or dress sense? Who would win that one?

I’m hoping Thathri, my yakshi would win that one Her kohl drenched eyes and lustrous hair give her a slight advantage.

9) How well do you think one of your characters would fare against the winner(s) of the above?

Well the Count may just get smitten by the yakshi…she’s far too seductive to ignore.

10) Tell us the basic premise behind your latest novel.

The story is about a search for love. When a couple who fall out of love go in search of the scrolls of love, they come face to face with a paranormal reality. A yakshi guards the scrolls at the hundred roomed house- she has been haunting the Big House for centuries. Although the book is about an outward search, it is a psychological drama of a seductress who is angry at the deck of cards called life she’s been given. The story goes back and forth in time- there is the present disillusioned Indian couple and there is a story that happened five centuries ago.  We all search for love but suppose our search is the very basis of the existence of someone else’s memory? What then? That’s what I wanted to talk about.

Unsettled: A summary by Neelima Vinod

05 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Guest posts

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

books, court poet, divya, guest blogging, guest posts, Neelima Vinod, paranormal romance, raghav, Scrolls of Love, Unsettled, Vampires, writing, Yakshi


You may remember Neelima from her appearance in Vampire Month in March this year. When Vampire Month was going live, she was on the verge of releasing her new novella – Unsettled – but did not really have much to tell us about it. This has now been rectified. Unsettled is out now and here Neelima tells us all about it…70112929-019 copy

Unsettled: A summary

The e-novella ‘Unsettled’ is about a search. We all go out in search of something, don’t we? Life is that. This story is set in the subcontinent- a young couple, Divya and Raghav,  have fallen out of love. They meet Dr. Ray with his unconventional methods. He zeroes in on the primary problem in their marriage. The only thing that can fix it is a search for the Scrolls of Love. Anyone who gets their hands on these scrolls will fall in love again, so goes the myth.

There’s a story behind the Scrolls of Love as well- I go back in time, five centuries ago in fact, to tell you the story of these scrolls of love, actually poems written by a court poet who was banished into Cherakad, a snake-infested forest land. Once a court poet, now a homeless man, the court poet walks into a house with one hundred rooms.

The unhappy couple walk into the same house centuries later. There they meet a femme fatale Yakshi spirit, drowned in centuries of loneliness. She’s a vampire seductress who refuses to bury memories and has a taste(a serious hunger) for young men. She knows what the couple are looking for and she is not the sort who will part with what Divya wants most.

unsettled-200x300Where does the search take them? That is what ‘Unsettled’ is all about.

Here’s a link to the book page: http://indireads.com/unsettled

Here’s a link to my author profile at Indireads: http://www.indireads.com/ir_author/neelima/

Bio: Neelima writes fiction and blogs poetry @ neelthemuse.wordpress.com. She’s written a book with a paranormal twist which will be coming out soon.

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