Cover Reveal! Blue Mumbai Stories: A Mumbai Short Story Collection #IWSG

Writing short stories is where it all began for me. Over the years, I moved on to writing novels, but never really gave up on reading and writing short stories.

Writing short stories can be a very different challenge than the longer form. It is more unforgiving of extraneous words, phrases, paragraphs.

Since I began my journey with writing shot stories, it has been natural for me to think of character backstories in terms of scenes and dialogues. This has come in very handy in getting to know my characters, and also been a useful pastime when I’m blocked while writing a novel.

While writing the Blue Mumbai series I drafted novels far in excess of what the thriller format and pacing would allow, and many of the scenes ended up on the cutting room floor.

I put up some of these ‘rejected’ excerpts on this site, editing them based on writing prompts. They tended to be popular. Some of the short stories I wrote from scratch, especially for the Write Edit Publish blog events run by Denise Covey and Yolanda Renee. Those were very rewarding exercises.

Over time, I began to send out short stories to subscribers in the One-Shot Gazette, which came about as a combination of inspiration from writing prompts given by readers and scenes from the Blue Mumbai universe that I could not include in a thriller. Writing stories for this gazette has been a wonderful exercise: it has actually exploded in terms of subscribers, and is the most popular of my gazettes. (You can check them all out here–they’re free and stuffed with curated resources.)

Today, a few weeks before the release of my next novel in the Blue Mumbai series, THE BLUE MONSOON, I’m publishing some of the short stories as the tiny Blue Mumbai Short Stories collection: tiny morsels of my fictional world for your reading pleasure. The Blue Mumbai Stories collection is an attempt to expand the universe of my Blue Mumbai series, which contains two novels so far: THE BLUE BAR and THE BLUE MONSOON.

It just seem like I need idea to pull together some of the short stories and collect them in one book. The characters in the stories that follow belong to those novels. On occasion, the characters are named. At others, they go unnamed. You can guess their identities if you’ve read the books and it might be fun to discover the Easter eggs left throughout. When writing thrillers, the author in me is often a tad upset. In order to keep up the pace, I sacrifice my curiosity about the backstories of the characters.

The stories in this collection fill up that gap and offer a voice to characters who are often only mentioned in passing in the novel, or appear in phone conversations. If you haven’t read the Blue Mumbai novels, the stories are hopefully still intriguing, and entice you to check the novels out.

Barring one or two, the stories are all less grim than the novels— Mumbai can sometimes be a dark place where inhumanity abounds, but these stories take you to the many pockets in Mumbai’s communities and the large hearts of Mumbaikars, where emotions like compassion, love, and forgiveness hold court and reign supreme.

So, here’s the cover, and here’s the link to pre-order, if you’re so inclined. The book will publish on the 8th of September–and since it is a tiny book filled with tiny stories, it might be up your alley if you’re jonesing for a quick read.