Like her writing, the author believes in chance

A permanent gray envelopes everything around. Clouds, an arm’s length away are doing somersaults on the mountains wearing thick greens. The light is tricky for a photo shoot, but author Anuja Chauhan is game -- like her writing, she believes in chance.

After all, every time she writes, it is an exercise to look through the fog.”There may be silhouettes and mist around when you start, but then it slowly melts and you walk with the faith that there is something out there... Also, my process changes with different books. The ‘reasons’ for writing may be different too -- sometimes a compelling theme, other times, a conflict,” Chauhan tells IANS during the Sikkim Art and Literature Festival organised by the state government in collaboration with Teamwork Arts.

Currently doing final edits on her upcoming book centering around a murder that takes place on Karva Chauth, the author makes it clear, it is not exactly a sequel to ‘Club You to Death’ as reported widely. The only common character is detective ACP Bhavani Singh. The book is set in Bangalore.

Some of Anuja Chauhan’s previous bestselling novels include ‘Those Pricey Thakur Girls’,’ Baaz’, ‘The Zoya Factor’ and ‘Battle for Bittora’.

In fact,’Those Pricey Thakur Girls’ is now a web series (‘Dil Bekaraar’) being streamed on Hotstar, and ‘Baaz’ has been taken by Yashraj and it could be a web series.

The author, who started her writing career with advertising and continues to write for different genres stresses the same keeps her sharp. “I write a column for. major magazine as well because it’s a different medium and I have to read the newspapers for that. And I write books as well of course. Advertising also shows up. It is like multi-training in the gym, doing new stuff to keep surprising the body for best results.”

Someone who detests labels -- like being called a Chick Lit writer, Chauhan says it is sad that everything is being labelled. “There are labels on behavior too, the kinds that never existed before. Why dumb down things by labelling them? Yes, it may work for publishers, but it is not healthy,” concludes the author who during her advertising days wrote lines like ‘Yeh Dil Mange More’ (Pepsi), ‘Dar Ke Aage Jeet Hai’ (Mountain Dew) and ‘Teda Hai Par Mera Hai’ (Kurkure).