Which author has not suffered the curse of writer’s block?
Never fear, for Seventh Sanctum has a number of random generators which can be used to combat this dastardly disease. Much like a game of mad libs, the site creates unexpected elements: from characters and setting to plot ideas.
For example, …

Humans as a species have ingrained six basic forms of music into their identity

I first discovered Arthur Machen via H.P. Lovecraft. Machen, a lover of the occult and all things supernatural, was a strong influence on Lovecraft’s brooding, claustraphobic horror style. Lovecraft’s short stories are wonderful in their ability to quickly evoke an atmosphere of dread. However, their ornate wording can be dense and a little over the top at times…

And there was something else that I didn’t realize about the author until coming across it in Stephen King’s excellent On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. In a passage on writing dialogue, King noted

Do you have the ‘guts’ to read Chuck Palahniuk?
Most people hear of the author via the modern cult movie Fight Club, which was adapted from his novel of the same name. In the film, a disillusioned Edward Norton attempts to overcome the emasculation and hollowness caused by modern American life …

It’s a good time for Indian writers who write in English. An exotic location (at least to people who don’t live there) mixed with philosophical/social/historical insights, mixed with some poetic substance and the obligatory magic-realism adds up to ching! ching! in the Western book market.

But Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s debut would be a little more stunning if you didn’t feel it had been done before by Arundhati Roy. Love it or hate it, The God of Small Things’s (TGOST) Booker win brought more attention to the genre and you get a feeling of deja vu.