Ruchira's Ramblings

So, finally, I've come up with the plan to keep this blog working. Writing work-outs! Yes! Over the sparsely productive years of my life as parts of various online writing communities, I have collected various writing prompts, exercizes to generate ideas, work-outs to break that damnable writers' block- all safely pasted, saved and filed away in an obscure folder on My Computer. Now, my plan is to use those exercizes to keep those blog-posts coming at respectable intervals. I might still come up with other posts, though, when the mood hits me, so watch out for those, but here's the first of the exercizes:  1. Think of adjectives that define your personality. For example, mine might be bold, cocky, friendly, straightforward and witty. With those adjectives in mind, write 350 words on your favourite activity, and infuse those personality traits into your words.  Right, I accept I'm cheating a bit here. This was written weeks ago and I just didn't post it. Becau...

Okay, so I have been passed on this writing meme by CatWoman Patti Larsen who has this fantastic story about a crow called Henry (just go check her blog , okay?) and here's a quote I stole from her blog: "A meme is a self-propagating unit of thought spread from one host to another, an idea-gene, if you will. For bloggers, memes can provide insight into the personalities of other writers that you wouldn’t necessarily find in their writing." Well, I don't know how much of an insight this will provide, but I'll try and express what writing means to me. Writing is a journey towards an unknown destination. Sometimes the path is easy,with verdant meadows and wild flowers dotting the road; sometimes it is rough, steep, difficult. Sometimes you may walk with fellow travellers, exchanging ideas, experiences and advices. And sometimes you must slog it alone. There will be times when the excitement of the adventure will keep you going. You will run, and run faster, thrilled...

Good Reads for Good Causes 50 Stories for Pakistan by 50 writers Produced by Big Bad Media http://www.bigbadmedia.com Look at the image on the cover of this book.(it's right there on the side bar) A man and a boy knee-deep in water. Father and son? Uncle and nephew? Teacher and pupil? Or perhaps just a kid, lost, tagging on to an adult in the hope that he will be taken somewhere safe, dry? They are wading away from the light into the darkness and gloom. The unknown. Fear. Hunger. Disease. But they are also wading towards you. They can’t ask for your help. You must choose to give it. A simple way of doing that is to buy this book. Proceeds go to helping the victims of the Pakistan floods. Available from the Blurb bookstore: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1678288 £4.95 Shambelurkling and Other Stories is an anthology of children’s stories and poems from writers far and wide, with all profits going to National Autistic Society Early Learning Plus Programme. £3.99 ...

[Fiction] Friday Challenge #180 for Nov 5th, 2010 Your Main Character picks a sliver of glass from their sleeve and gravely inspects it……..( now keep writing) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fruit Punch Monica picked out a sliver of glass from the linen mesh of her sleeve and inspected it gravely. It was thin, sharp and jagged. She was lucky it hadn’t cut her arm. The front of her white boho shirt was all spoiled with fruit punch. A few people around them had stopped in the middle of their dancing to know what the commotion was about. “I’m so, so, sorry,” the light-eyed man was apologizing endlessly, “I just slipped. I swear I’ve got to get some new shoes. Here, are you okay?” He extended a hand. She could have got up on her own, but he was grinning so sheepishly, like he wouldn’t think she had accepted his apologies if she didn’t take his hand, so she did. It was a muscular and firm grip, but also warm and soft and… was t...

So I finished my M.A Part2 exams way back in June & so for all practical purposes, I've nothing to do with my beloved university till the results come out I-don't-know-when.And I've read some books since then- Rushdie's Midnight's Children which was mesmerizing, then Shashi Tharoor's brilliant novel Riot (hey, I thought the guy only tweeted! Ignorant me!), then a non-fiction book by Amitabh Ghosh about Pokhran and nuclear weapons (well, when I bought the book from a railway station platform, I thought I was buying fiction... but anyway, Ghosh is still good, even though he totally flummoxed & disappointed me with the ending of Calcutta Chromosome) & then a Bengali translation (by Rajsekhar Basu) of the Mahabharata- which left me clueless about the roles of fate and free will in the epic, and then, guess what I ended up reading next? The vegetarian vampires cometh, netizens- yess, I've finally read Twilight. Bella - you're the most disgusting, ...