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Tag Archives: Yakshi

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.

[Vampire Month] Beginnings by Neelima Vinod

27 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Vampire Month

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Apsaras, asuras, Demons, devas, Gods and Godesses, Neelima P, South Asian myth, Vampires, Yakshi


Today, for our final Vampire Month guest, we have Neelima Vinod who has written a short fiction piece covering how she came to be inspired by a particular South Asian version of the Vampire myth – the Yakshi.

I shall turn it over to her now:

Thank you David for having me here!

Beginnings

I like to go out sometimes and sit beside the pond. There I watch the black fish nibble at my feet and the coconut trees reflect themselves. It is at times like these that I compose a poem or contemplate a character that made its way out of a book into my heart. I’m usually left alone at times like these but today I hear a woman hum as she comes toward me and sits with me by the lichened steps.yakshi

“Can I join you?” she says. She is playful and I a woman, unafraid of another.

“Desperate?” I ask her because I know at once who she is. She is alarmingly beautiful, a siren from Greek myth or an apsara. I think her eyes are made of precious stones and her hair of the ocean. She is what we call in these parts, a yakshi. “No men to pick on these days?”

She looks away from me, perhaps at the faraway worlds she is supposed to inhabit. Perhaps she looks at the humid landscape before her as I do. It is hard to say.

“What do you think?” she asks me. “You should know as you have heard about the tree spirit that I am falling on men and enveloping them. Not many have survived after I’ve entered their lives.”

She is as beautiful as folklore makes her out to be.When I grew up, there were witches and wizards; there were elves, goblins and gnomes. Being from the subcontinent, my world is populated by additional figures of interest-apsaras(dancing goddesses), asuras( demons) and devas(gods). Then there is folklore- where the yakshi comes in.

                       

“Tell me about them.” I ask her quietly, as the green pond spreads through the horizon of my eyes and the blue sky above refuses to bleed in the heat.

“The men?”she asks. If she were a contemporary woman, she would have blown out smoke from a cigarette as she spoke. Her movements are so of the now but she looks centuries ago, in her white sari and gold chains. I nod.

“So many. Some of them had never been loved, imagine that, grown men who have only dreamt of being touched. Some of them were rogues who did not know what touch meant, their fingers were meant to tear, but the world is made of so many kinds.”

“Why do you tell me all this?” I ask. “Perhaps I must rush back to my quiet sanctuary and disappear into a book. Maybe all this heat is getting to me.

“You asked me, didn’t you? I’m defined as so many things. Noone seems to get it right. Yes I’m a bit of a vampire.” She bears her pearly white fangs at me. Then as though she showed me a trifle, she lifts the hem of her sari and shows me her feet a foot above the ground.” Yes I hover” and then as she turns around, I stop her.

Her eyes are hollow when she speaks. “They say I lure them from the palm tree.”

“Don’t you?”

“I follow their smell and feel their skin. They leave a trail. They think they are safe and can just be. Unlike” she looks at me with her searching eyes, “women like you who have to think twice about wherever you’re at.”

“I know all about your sort, sometimes spirit, sometimes venomous. You kill. ” I say pretending not to like her motives, ignoring her conspiratorial friendship.

“They kill me many times before I kill them.” she says. “ Though they do not live to tell the tale.” She wraps the edge of her sari around her fingers. We say nothing and the world around us disappears for the night.

When she is gone like a shimmering sunset ended, she leaves me alone with far too many questions about how lust has been demonized in the subcontinent. How the consequences of it could lead to a smashed skull and a heap of bones and hair, or simply put how it could lead to being ostracized forever.

I walk back to my sanity. There are some poems to write and maybe a story about a yakshi.

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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