Meet Kusum - Journalist turned Writer

#AuthorInterviews

• Hello, please tell us something about yourself.

I’m Kusum Choppra, long time journalist, turned writer, with interests from environment, alternate
medicine to numerology.   In the last decade, Altitudinis is my five book out, this time with company. Novel experience.  BTW voracious reader of material to do with real people n history, total genre gypsy, from hard core history to nostalgia to feminism to senior romance to a thriller! 
You guessed it, crazy as a cookie, headlined the collaborative novel with a chapter written years ago and the oldest in the group at 70.  Love creating stories, tiny grains of truth surrounded by verbal embroidery; twists in the tale are my forte, with verbal emoting rather than yarns of descriptions. 
My literary joy & pride: after over two decades of digging, the only book with two endings: MASTANI that has earned me the prestige of Mastani’s biographer in some circles.

• Please tell us something about your book ‘Altitudinis’.

Amazing adventure tale, with a rainbow of experiences from our varied professions. Truly the transformation of a story about 2 childless women into a heart thumping thriller with a web of international intrigue and crime over an unusual experimental drug combo of immense value and application, never ceases to amaze me whenever I look back.  Mapping out two kidnappings, four murders amidst heart and other breaks with a galaxy of other colorful characters brought 8 women and two men, earlier virtual strangers, into a shared bond with our creation.  It is a thriller alright, but with much more grit, morals, vices and heart than those usual thrillers with two and half romantic scenes for time pass.

• What makes your writing style different from other co-authors of the book?

Most of our younger writers are very attuned to scientific research and the thriller parts; my limitations may sound amusing -- usually geographical and historical research, studying human characters from an emotional angle.     This was my first brush with adventures of a non-emotional kind;  hence the creation of Nirali, Sudha, Sitara and Nikhil that sparked off the adventure; of course at times when the rest caught up with official responsibilities, I would pick the baton at wherever the last chapter had stopped to move the story ahead.   Plus frequent editing practice allowed me to smoothen over.

• How is co-authoring a book different from writing a book as solo author? 

You know, a solo author can become a lonely hermit while writing a book.  You have the glimmerings of the plot in your head, or written down; you need to do research on different angles of your story and to actually write in down, whether long hand or keyboard.  Anything else is an irritable distraction – hardly good for human relations, na?  But in this case, it was a breeze, with shared research, shared plotting, sharing new ideas and thrashing sense into them or ejecting them.  Probably the only cons were waiting for the next chapter to appear, usually late!  Or when a chapter couldn’t be fitted into the plot and heartbreak happened.

• Define ‘Altitudinis’ in one line from your perspective.

A suspenseful thriller with amazing human angles that won’t let the reader put it down.

So, do you, my reader friends, have any questions for Kusum?

Feel free to let us know.

Also, do grab your copy of this super-exciting book via below links.

Lots of Love