BS Murthy in Awsome Gang

 

My Author interview in Awsome Gang  excerpted as under http://awesomegang.com/bs-murthy-3/

Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.

I’m BS Murthy, an Indian novelist, playwright, short story, non-fiction and articles writer, translator and a ‘little’ thinker and a budding philosopher with “Addendum to Evolution: Origins of the world” published in The Examined Life On-Line Philosophy Journal, Vol. 05 Issue 18, Summer 2004.

The fictional part of my body of work of ten free ebooks (widely available in the web-world) comprises of three ‘plot and character’ driven novels, Benign Flame: Saga of Love, Jewel-less Crown: Saga of Life and Crossing the Mirage: Passing through youth; a stream of consciousness novel, Glaring Shadow; a crime novel, Prey on the Prowl, a book of short stories, Stories Varied and Onto the Stage – Slight Souls and other stage and radio plays.

The above creative endeavor emanated from my conviction that for fiction to impact readers, it should be the soulful rendering of characters rooted in their native soil but not the hotchpotch of local and alien caricatures sketched on a hybrid canvas.

While my Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife is a novel narrative non-fiction, possibly a new genre, Bhagvad-Gita: Treatise of self-help and Sundara Kãnda: Hanuman’s Odyssey) are my trans-creations of Sanskrit classics in contemporary verses.

What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?

“Stories Varied – A Book of Short Stories” is my last book with a story behind it.
With the addition of ‘Prey on the Prowl’ to my body of work, I thought the accretion was over without short story genre. Not that I didn’t try my hand at that, indeed I did, but finding the output wanting, I didn’t refill my pen again.
Maybe, literature was keen to have my contribution in this fictional sphere as well, so it seems, as beginning from July 2015, Vinita Dawra Nagia came up with “Write India Campaign of Times of India”. Her idea was to let the aspiring writers build their stories on the ‘prompts’ provided by eleven of India’s popular authors starting with Amish Tripathi.
When I penned Ilaa’s Ire on Amish’s prompt, it felt like I had crossed the unassailable frontier, and thereafter, for the next ten months, thanks to the prompts by the leading lights of Indian English writing, I had experienced the joy of short story writing.
That in the end, I could pen my “Twelfth Tale”, sans any prompting, is a matter of personal satisfaction.

Do you have any unusual writing habits?

I write thick, fast and furious to bring my creative idea to its literary fruition as a manuscript, maybe owing to my impulsive muse, and if it were to be an’unusual’ writing habit, so be it.

What authors, or books have influenced you?

When I was yet to touch an English book, at fourteen that is, it was C. Subba Rao, my ‘journalist’ maternal uncle, who advised me to first read classics for they would improve my language, broaden my vision of life and deepen my understanding of it. He also provided a rider to his advice that if I first venture into the fast-paced modern fiction, then I would never be able to develop taste to savor the slow-paced descriptive classical novels.
Fortunately, as I went by his advice, my literary course took me to the continental fiction of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, Zola, Flaubert, Proust and some such ‘greats’ by which I am benefited literally and otherwise.
While I was savoring their works, never did I dream that in my mid-forties my muse, shaped by those, would stir me into penning my Indian writings in English.

What are you working on now?

Looks like, I’m done with it for after all, like everything else in life, one’s creativity too is bound by its limitations.

What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?

Given that our ‘world of letters’ has become a book jungle for readers to wade their way through it to find the work that could be right for them (a reader for every book and every book has a reader) there is nothing else an author can do than to try to place his works in as many websites as he possibly could, in the hope that some readers might notice them and find them interesting as well.

Do you have any advice for new authors?

I have come to believe that my life had prepared me to be a writer, and possibly that could be the case with every aspiring author.

What is the best advice you have ever heard?
There’s no dearth of sound guidance to good life in the air of any land, and it depends on how much of it we inhale and how much of it we exhale.

What are you reading now?

Right now I’m preoccupied being a trumpeter of my body of work and hopefully I would start experiencing the joy of good reading, sooner than later.

What’s next for you as a writer?
Live and die, with the satisfaction that my body of work could be giving joy to some readers.

If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?

If I name only three books of others out of dozens I hold dear, not only that would be unfair to those I would leave out but also to my own works, and on the other hand, if I name my own ones ( in itself unfair to leave 6 or 7 of them), it would be ungrateful on my part to leave out the ones that shaped my life and times.