Interview with Mita Balani

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An Interview with Mita Balani

Everyone has a ‘first novel’, even if many of them are a rough draft relegated to the bottom and back of your desk drawer (or your external hard drive!). Have you been able to reshape yours, or have you abandoned it for good?

I have a few relegated short stories, but not a full length novel. Breaking Norms is my first. After finishing the first draft in 2013, four years was too long to take it to the finish line. But I am glad, I did it.

Some authors are able to pump out a novel a year and still be filled with inspiration. Is this the case for you, or do you like to let an idea percolate for a couple of years in order to get a beautiful novel?

Writing fills my heart with joy. I always have one or two story ideas running in my head. But with my primary job that pays the bills and mother/wife duty, writing takes the third priority in the list. So I am not sure if a novel a year be possible for me. But for sure more will come out.

I have heard of writers that could only write in one place – then that cafe closed down and they could no longer write! Where do you find yourself writing most often, and on what medium (pen/paper or digital)?

I am sure those writers must be beyond devastated if the café closed down. I have written in different places based on circumstances the Public Library, one specific Starbucks near my home and even while waiting in line for something. But I find my creative juices working better when I write using one particular desktop in my office/study room. I use digital medium the desktop or the phone to write.

Before going on to hire an editor, most authors use beta-readers. How do you recruit your beta-readers, and choose an editor? Are you lucky enough to have loving family members who can read and comment on your novel?

Yes, I consider myself very lucky to have a husband who played a role of the first reader and the critique both. I also have other 3 amazing family and friends who read the first rough draft. Their feedback helped to polish the story.

Regarding editor, I chose one online editing service based on online reviews. Paid a hefty amount, but was not happy with the results. So I ended up editing it myself all over again. For my next one, one of my good friends has volunteered to help with editing. I am grateful to have amazing family and friends around.

I walk past bookshops and am drawn in by the smell of the books – ebooks simply don’t have the same attraction for me. Does this happen to you, and do you have a favourite bookshop? Or perhaps you are an e-reader fan… where do you source most of your material from?

I love the smell of the new paper books. But in last seven years, I have become fan of e-books just because I can read the e-book on my phone anywhere, anytime. I buy all my e-books on Amazon and paper books for major parts on Amazon as well. I also enjoy listening audio books while driving. I get all my audio CDs from local public library.

I used to find myself buying books in only one genre (fantasy) before I started writing this blog. What is your favourite genre, and do you have a favourite author who sticks in your mind?

I grew up reading the books in regional language (Marathi in India), then transitioned to reading in Indian National language (Hindi) before I read English novels. So my favorite authors till young adults are from that region of India where I grew up. As a child I hardly read for fun. So I can’t really say who my favorite author from Childhood is.
Adolescence: P. L. Deshpande
Young Adult: Gulzar (love his poetry)
Adult: Khaled Hosseini
Favorite genre: My reading liking changed after my young adult time. Since then I enjoy reading soulful and emotional tales with a hint of romance.

Social media is a big thing, much to my disgust! I never have enough time myself to do what I feel is a good job.

Have you chosen someone to manage your profile?
I thought about it initially, but then dropped the idea considering the financial aspect of it.

I am still in the phase of exploring different options. I haven’t spent much time promoting my debut fiction yet due to so much going on in my personal life at the moment. I hope to promote more in near future.
So far, my favorite platform has been Facebook. Before book launch, for about two months, I spent two hours every alternate day, learning/implementing what I learned, making mistakes on the way and learning from those mistakes as well.

I use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and blog once in a while.

Answering interview questions can often take a long time! Tell me, are you ever tempted to recycle your answers from one to the next?

Even though I have been running 103 fever for last couple of days, I answered these questions from scratch. But I am thinking about your question….hmm…I will not be tempted to recycle the answers or will I? 😉

Review: Kathleen Duey – Sacred Scars

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Sacred Scars
Kathleen Duey

Sadima is desperate to escape from life in a cave, and she longs to have a better relationship to Franklin, one more like when they first met. It’s not to be though as Franklin becomes more enamoured with Somiss and his students. Many generations later, Haph is trying to survive learning dangerous magic with dangerous teachers – with only one student to come out on top… Unless Haph can make some changes to the trust issues running rampart in the school.

I left this novel impossibly long to review… But I have a very good reason/excuse! This is a trilogy, and I’ve owned the first two books (Skin Hunger) for at least 5 years I think. I picked them up from the op-shop as a steal, assuming that the third book must have been published. But no! The author seems to have dropped off the end of the earth for the last couple of years, despite apparently there being a release date for the last book. I emailed the publishers and lo and behold, it’s a mistake. No release date in sight.

Once that third novel is finally published, I’m going to reread these from the beginning, they are that good! So I’ve giving it 5 stars but I wouldn’t suggest you read it until the third one is finally published! Get your hands on a cheap second hand copy, but don’t read it! For goodness sake, don’t read it! But absolutely chase up the publishers (Simon and Schuster) to make sure that it eventually happens. For your reference: ISBN 9780689840982.

Review: Victoria Carless – the dream walker

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the dream walker
Victoria Carless

Lucy is 16 and ready to flee from Digger’s Landing, where the fish no longer bite and the dogs are covered with fleas. Her mother drowned herself and her father is desperate. Lucy wants to just get out of town and go to university, but her best friend is bailing in order to earn money

This is set in a ‘small Queensland fishing hamlet home to fifteen families, a posse of mongrel dogs, and Parkers Corner Store (no apostrophe and nowhere near a corner).’ Apart from some descriptive language that drove me crazy after a while (just say it already!), there was nothing good about this novel. I never connected to Lucy, or felt like I got into her friendship with Polly or her ?complicated? boyfriend relationship. 

The dreams come into this novel as an interesting plot point, where Lucy can help other people in her life from what she learns in dreams. Plenty of other dreamwalkers to read about: Dream Fire or Dream Strider. Don’t waste your precious reading time.

I couldn’t finish this novel. It was just so slow and boring. I barely remember reading the first part honestly, so I had trouble coming up with my own blurb. 1 star. Don’t bother.

Reviews: Tim Watson-Munro – Dancing with Demons

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Dancing with Demons
Tim Watson-Munro

Tim became a psychologist in a high security prison early in his career. This set him up well in order to become a renowned psychological criminal profiler. But a job with high visibility leads to a lot of stress, and the associated mental health and addiction problems that eventually caused Tim to fall off the rails – and write this memoir.

It’s scary that a huge number of the people who are criminals stored in prison actually have mental health problems. If those problems could have been caught earlier they probably wouldn’t have the drug habit or the addiction that led to them being put in jail in the first place!

I find it very interesting that the author refers to the jail and spells it in the American form which is JAIL not GAOL. Personally, I always thought this was a stupid way of spelling it! Spell it how it sounds, there ain’t no ‘g’ in there. It’s not a memoir for everyone. It does tackle the author’s drug problem / past drug problem quite in depth which some people could find uncomfortable to read.

This offers a quite an insight into different well-known criminal minds that although Tim has said he hasn’t revealed anything that is not publically available, is very interesting. I think that people who are more familiar with the criminal underworld would probably get even more out of it than I did. I really try to avoid following the news…

I enjoyed it because I’m interested in mental illness. I’m actually feeling quite inspired to go and look at some other statistics in the area for how many mental health problems present in this population. Of course this book documents a time when our jails were very rough and you would hope that they’ve changed by now. The novel allows the reader to look along through the years to an extent, providing some interesting information about the early years of the rehabilitation program.

It is really, really well documented that crims can’t adapt back to society. The minute that you bring them back into society, they can’t deal with freedom and usually find themselves reoffending because they don’t know what to do with themselves. It’s difficult to find jobs, it’s possible they no longer have any family left, and then only the option to survive is to go back to crime. Jail ultimately is more of a cost to the community than the criminals.

The problem is that the majority of people think that locking crims up actually solves the problem. But there are always more people to offend and it’s also well-documented that people have received training in jail from more senior criminals to commit worse crimes. There are exceptions to that of course, including chart molesters & serious people that are actually psychopaths. You can read about a fictional psychopath in Breaking Butterflies.

Pan Macmillan | 27th June 2017 | AU $34.99 | paperback

Spotlight with Mita Balani

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A Spotlight with Mita Balani

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mita Balani was born in a small town of India and has been living in the United States for several years. Growing up, she cherished writing stories and reciting poems. In engineering college, where most of her classmates published technical papers, she enjoyed taking part in storytelling contests, debates, and poetry competitions. Today she has a successful career in Information Technology, but she still loves writing stories and poems. This book is her first foray in writing a novel. This novel is inspired from parts of a true story. Life experiences of an Indian origin lesbian friend living in the United States inspired her to write this story.

You can connect with author on her website at www.mitabalani.com
You can follow the author on social media:
Facebook: @MitaBalaniAuthor
Instagram: mitabalani
Twitter: @MitaBalani
Pintrest: mitabalani 

ABOUT BREAKING NORMS

Breaking Norms is a story of two Indian girls living in Mumbai. It’s a tale of friendship, love and the struggle to be together as a same-sex couple. The book depicts their romantic love (non-erotic) and emotional journey from Mumbai to New Jersey through the social/cultural/family tussle and anguish. 

Description:

What if you fall in love and your family thinks you are crazy? Sonia too gets in a similar situation.

Sonia, a submissive and people-pleasing girl falls in love with the chirpy girl Esha. Their common passion for painting brings them closer. Sonia realizes that no one in her family will accept her relationship with Esha. But her heart and emotional state are beyond the control of her own mind. At first, they keep their relationship on the hush. Unfortunately, their secret comes out in an ugly way and havoc breaks loose. Will Sonia stand up for herself and withstand the pressure of not following the cultural norms? Are they destined to meet? Can Sonia and Esha live happily ever after?

Breaking Norms is a captivating and engrossing tale of love, agony and tolerance.

Book Video Teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4aWt8Up6tQ

Find this novel on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. Links given below for more details:

Amazon Australia Kindle

Amazon USA Kindle

Goodreads

A Few Quotes from Breaking Norms 

“The silence of the house gives the feeling of loneliness, broken hearts, and perhaps damaged relationships.”

“Abruptly, the promise of not leaving your husband until death hits me hard. I feel as if I am a demon who doesn’t want to play by the rules of marriage.”

“My own mind turns into my clever foe, leaving me miserable and unhappy, dropping me at the corner of a bifurcated road, for me to decide one path over the other to walk on.”

“A relationship with sadness is not new to me by now. But this time around, the depth of it is beyond anything I ever witnessed or even imagined.”

Review: Teri Terry – contagion

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contagion
Teri Terry

Shay saw Callie the day she disappeared. But it’s years later by the time Shay realises that she might remember something important, something that could help Kai to find his sister Callie. With a strange epidemic crossing the continent, Shay and Kai need to be careful to find Callie… or maybe she will find them first.

I felt so cheated by this book! Trilogy, grumble, grumble. Doesn’t anyone ever write a decent stand alone novel these days? I even bet that when the second in this trilogy comes out, it won’t have the blood red page edging of this first novel, so it doesn’t match the rest! Sure, the author has written other trilogies, but honestly! How hard it is to write a fantastic standalone novel.

I hated, hated, hated that I tricked myself. I was happily reading along for at least a quarter of the novel, thinking that Shay (Sharona) was embarrassed by HIS name. So then when Kai came along, and Shay wasn’t sure if Kai was into HIM, I was thinking ‘Yay, two gay characters that aren’t even making a big deal out of it, this is how fiction should read’. Then I suddenly realised that Shay was a GIRL. And I cracked it and got really grumpy and frustrated at the novel. There was so much potential there, and it seemed like the environment was what it should be. Ugh. 

I honestly didn’t get much of a sense of ‘suspense’ or ‘thrill’ from this novel. I guess after my initial mistake, I was no longer attached to the characters. It’s exciting to read a novel that isn’t set in the US, and instead is limited to England and surrounds. However, you would expect a bit more to be made of the presumably more scenic bike rides and so forth that Kai and Shay get to do.

3 stars. I disappointed myself on this one on two counts: the main character wasn’t gay and it was the first of yet another trilogy. Another plague novel? I’ve seen it done better.

Hachette Australia | 1st May 2017 | AU $16.99 | paperback

Review: Leonie Thorpe – Archie’s Adventures

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Archie’s Adventures
Leonie Thorpe

Young Archie Roach is new in town and has nothing remarkable about him. At least he was famous for a hideous bone fracture at his last school… Doomed to obscurity, Archie’s life is filled with being a pathetic Roach – until he makes friends with a local smuggler.

Archie is a fine character, I’m not really sure what else to say. My partner’s mother got me to read this book – in fact she handed me two different copies at two different times! Honestly, I wasn’t that excited by it, because I’ve sworn off reading children’s fiction now. It’s fine as a novel, I’ve just moved past it, and my (female) young reader wouldn’t be interested in it.

It’s a typical ‘reluctant reader’ boy novel – fishing and football! But then there is a bit of sailing as well. Typical team building activities with an old man and a useless hanger-on. Anyway, I shouldn’t be so disparaging. This is why I can’t read children’s fiction any more! Unless it is Isobelle Carmody, and it’s The Red Wind series. Standby for a review of the newest novel, The Ice Maze.

Three stars from me. Fine for kids, not worth it for adults. Not enough ‘meat’ here to make it a chapter book to read at bedtime to your kids.

Review: Lily Bailey – Because We Are Bad

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Because We Are Bad
Lily Bailey

Lily’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder was out of hand from nearly in her childhood. Without a point of reference, she thought that everyone thought this way. Eventually, OCD was ruling her life to the extent that she couldn’t function. A series of doctors, medications and therapy later, Lily can live an almost normal life.

Anything that could go wrong? She was going to be responsible for it. Anything that did go wrong? She had cursed the person and made it happen. Only by using rituals could Lily overcome some of her limitations, and it was a hard struggle the whole way along.

Dr Finch makes a huge impact on Lily’s life, and this relationship that Lily explores in depth in this novel shows the complexities of patient-doctor interactions. A good doctor can bring patients a long step forward, and bad ones can set patients’ progress back by many years and even prevent them from seeking help.

This memoir is less ‘meaty’ than The Man Who Couldn’t Stop, but still a good addition to someone’s library who has an interest in OCD and how it can manifest in a variety of ways. It might be a ‘read once and pass it on book’, but it’s well worth that read. If it was a fiction novel, I’d give it 4 stars.

Allen & Unwin | 10th May 2017 | AU$29.99 | paperback

Review: Scott Pape – the barefoot investor

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the barefoot investor
Scott Pape

Scott Pape is a fiercely independant general financial advisor who is the reason that I tear apart my neighbour’s Sunday newspaper just to read Scott’s column. With the advent of it being online, I can just wait for the email to arrive instead.

This book is for people who know how to manage their money at a basic level and also those who don’t know how to manage at all. Scott takes people through money in 9 easy steps – with date nights and beers so that you and your partner are on the same page about your goals.

I regularly follow Scott’s column, and honestly this book didn’t offer much new for me. I had already implemented most of the strategies that he suggests – I’ve even started stepping into the scary world of shares! But for people who are in debt or don’t own their home, this novel is a match made in heaven! It has simple, actionable steps that anyone can carry out and should be on a list of books to buy young adults as they get their first credit card (and then chop it up on Scott’s orders) and move into independent living.

I pre-ordered this book before Christmas to take advantage of both a discount on the purchase price and an online webinar with Scott. The discount was nice, but the webinar was worthless. I’ve now purchased a membership in Scott’s online Barefoot Blueprint. I’d recommend this for people who are ready to move into their next stage of investing.

If you’re terrified of opening your mail, or just want to help out a person struggling with money in your life, this is the book for you.

Reviews: Catherine Lacey – The Answers

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The Answers
Catherine Lacey

Mary suffers from unexplained body pains. Left in pain with no money, no hope and no answers (haha), she’s willing to try anything. Her oldest friend in the world suggests a pricy wholistic treatment – and the first session seems to help. But Mary is going to need to finance it somehow – she’s going to be the Emotional Girlfriend.

I’m really frustrated by this book because it started off quite promisingly with a woman that is suffering from unexplained body pain, who then was able to recover by using this special psychic therapy. Which of course manipulates her emotions, and her practitioner’s emotions, lining her up perfectly to be the…

EMOTIONAL GIRLFRIEND for self-suffering, stuck up jerk of an actor who thinks that he can change the outlines of love. What starts out as an experiment as far as she knows sort of goes more weirdly the further along you get. I was reading along very happily because they hadn’t fallen in love yet (my partner pointed out this has two hearts on the cover, one of red and one of blue) and it didn’t seem to be another irritating straight romance. Since there were lots of girlfriends and the blurb said things about unexpected relationships developing, I got excited! Then clearly nothing happened: basically she didn’t fall for the guy which was AMAZING, but then it’s all the scientists’ fault they were manipulating them. I basically want to give away the whole story because otherwise, like me, you will read two thirds of it and then say “Wow I wasted a lot of time reading that, when nothing has actually happened!”

I didn’t actually feel a connection with any of the characters. I hated the main actor character which may have been because he was a man. But perhaps I was supposed to hate him… or maybe it was because I just never emotionally connected with any of the characters. This was due to a number of factors, including jumping around between perspectives; a bit of the main character’s perspective, then a bit of each side character acting. These characters weren’t even 2D, the other girlfriends weren’t important and they were just distractions. That space could have been used to resolve Mary’s whole complicated emotional background about being an orphan, but instead the read is left drifting along aimlessly.

I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t recommend it and all I can think of is that maybe this is written so that people who have read The Secret can say “Oh look, perfect, this book says it has The Answers”. Maybe if they were suckers enough to get into The Secret then they might be suckers enough to enjoy this novel. I didn’t. I finished it, but it was a struggle and I freely admit I speed read the last couple pages. I wish I hadn’t wasted my precious reading time on it. 1 begrudging star.

Allen & Unwin | 28th June 2017 | AU $27.99 | paperback