But I Smile Anyway…

How exciting to have another Desi author to chew the fat with! Today, the lovely Jeevani Charika joins me for a Book and a Brew.

Hello, and welcome to But I Smile Anyway, Jeevani! Let’s get you set with a drink first. Tea,
coffee, hot chocolate, or maybe a masala chai?

Tea, please! Milk, no sugar.

I have a few freshly baked chocolate-coated shortbread cookies, or if you want something a
little more savoury, I have chevda!

Chocolate-coated shortbread is the best shortbread! I’ll have some of that, please.

So, could you tell me a bit about your journey to becoming a published author, Jeevani?

I wrote my first book back in the mid-2000s. I’d finished my PhD and suddenly I had
time in the evenings. We didn’t have a TV, so I started writing that book I’d always
been promising myself I’d write. It took three years for me to write it, fitting it into
the slivers of the evening after a long commute to London. That first book was about
two British Sri-Lankans. It was regular women’s fiction about their friendship and not
about their ‘otherness’ because they were Asian.
I started sending it out and got rejections (just like everyone else does!), but I got a
few handwritten notes on the standard rejection slip – you still had to send
submissions by post in those days. These notes were along the lines of ‘You can
write, but I don’t know where I’d sell this book’. (Rolling my eyes… I do know what you are talking about!) Those scraps of good feedback gave me hope.
I joined the Romantic Novelists Association’s New Writers Scheme and sent the book
in for a critique. The report I got back was super useful. Right at the end, the
reviewer said ‘You have a romcom voice crying to get out, have you thought about
writing something for fun?’. I took that advice to heart and wrote a romcom about a
white couple – Girl On The Run – and started submitting that. I got an offer from a
small US ebook publisher within about a year.

You wrote under a pen name of Rhoda Baxter, initially, before using Jeevani Charika.
What prompted the change?

When I got my contract for Girl On The Run, my publisher asked me if I was going to use a
pen name. I did my PhD on a bacterium called Rhodobacter, so I called myself Rhoda Baxter.
I wrote about ten books as Rhoda Baxter. I will probably write more.
I still wanted to write books where the main characters happen to be Sri Lankan, so I wrote
another book like that and queried agents again. (By this time I had four books traditionally
published, but still had no agent). When Girl Having a Ball was shortlisted for an RNA award I wrote out something like 20 agent submissions and sent them all out on the day the award
shortlists were announced. One agent got back to me. I met her for the first time at the
awards ceremony and she signed me the following week.
I’m getting to the point, I promise.

This is all important stuff. I think you need some more sugar. Here!

Yes please. I’d love another biscuit. Thanks.
Where was I? Oh yes. The agent. She started sending my book out and got lots of rejections
(she was incensed because someone actually said to her ‘We have a diverse author already’
as part of a discussion!). Around this time Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced their
engagement. My agent was chatting to an editor who said they would love to work with an
author of colour to write about a woman of colour who married a prince. The problem was,
the book had to be written in just under 3 months. When my agent said this, I thought ‘Sure.
I’m up for a challenge,’ and said yes. It was a stressful few months, but Christmas At The
Palace was written at top speed and was published just before the royal wedding. They
wanted to use my real name for that book. So I was finally published as Jeevani Charika.
That very first book I wrote – the one that took 3 years to write. It was finally published in
2019 by Hera Books as A Convenient Marriage. It was shortlisted for an RNA award. I didn’t
win, but the lady who did win that category was Sue Moorcroft … who was the person who
wrote the NWS report that steered me towards romcoms! What an achievement!

How have you found the publishing industry as a Desi author? One thing I love about
your writing is that you use Desi characters, but make sure the story is not about
their ‘desi-ness’ rather use that element of them as an added masala or flavour to
the story in general.

Yes, yes! It’s something I feel strongly about. For the longest time, you didn’t see
South Asian (or any other ethnic minority) characters just being people and going
about their lives. They were always in books weighed down by the immigrant
struggle. I think society influences art, but art influences society, too. If the only
brown people you see in books and films are the stereotypical struggling immigrants,
then you are left with the impression that that’s all they can be.
In real life, brown people do things like fall in love, have family drama and solve
crimes. So why can’t you see them in the books, too?
The example I like to quote is the kids show Marrying Mum and Dad. My kids
watched that and didn’t bat an eyelid when it was ‘Marrying Mum and Mum’ or
Marrying Dad and Dad’ as it sometimes was. Partly because of this representation,
they are growing up feeling that it’s completely normal to have different
combinations of parents. This is as it should be. Art influences how we see the world
around us.
I remember, when I watched Monsoon Wedding, it blew my mind, because I finally
saw Asian people I recognised. I know people like that. I could relate to them in a
way that I couldn’t relate to the people in East is East.
I’m so glad that we are seeing more books about Asian people just being people
now. We get to fall in love, or solve crime, or have space adventures as main
characters! YES!

I’ve read most of your books, written under Jeevani Charika, and loved each and
every one! Do you have a favourite out of the books you have published so far?

Let me just shut the door so that the books can’t hear… Yes. Yes I do.
I love all the books I’ve written, but A Convenient Marriage is my favourite Jeevani
Charika book. That was the first book I read by you, too! I have a gorgeous paperback of it! It was the first book I wrote, so that makes it special, but it’s also set partly in Oxford in the 90s and the settings are drawn from my memories of my time
as a student. (Random aside – A friend from college read it and asked me if I’d
experienced some of the micro-agressions that the character faced in Oxford. I said
yes, and he said, ‘but I was there. I didn’t see that. I had to gently point out that he,
as a privately educated white boy, might have had a slightly different experience
than I, a state educated Asian kid from Yorkshire had done. Bless.)

Do you have a special place where you do all your creating and writing? Somewhere
away from the craziness of family?

I write in bed. I’ve tried writing at a desk – I get backache. Writing at the kitchen table
is just nonsense because people keep asking me for things. The only place that
seems to work is writing tucked up in bed. It’s warmer too.
When I worked full-time, I wrote for 2 hours every night once the kids were in bed.
Now that I’m freelance, I still find my best writing time is those 2 hours at night once
the kids are in bed. I seem to have trained my brain into being creative between 8
and 10pm.

You love a bit of Canva, too, don’t you? Definitely a bit of an expert, there! I’ve
watched many of your videos to see how to use certain features. Do you design your
own covers on there, or does the publisher do them?

The publishers do the covers for my traditionally published books. I make my own covers for
the self published books. I initially started learning how to use Canva because my first
couple of publishers gave me no marketing assets at all, apart from the book cover, so I had
to learn how to make some images. I gradually got hooked. I started making Canva tutorials
because I spent so much time playing with Canva for fun. I really enjoy doing it. I’ve started
making little bundles of ready made promo images for authors to use – you just drag and
drop your own book cover into it and you’re good to go.
I usually play with Canva at night, when the words have run out and I just want to make
something for fun.

Let’s get back to your latest release, Knowing Me, Knowing You. I always love a book
with some characters from previous stories making appearances, so that was great!
Did you plan for this to happen?

Knowing Me, Knowing You started with Gihan, who had a tiny part in both Playing For Love
and Picture Perfect. I had to work out why he was behaving the way he was in Picture
Perfect and then I built the story from there. I like following the stories of minor characters
in later books. In my head, these people are real, and I want to know more about them. I
also like that I get to go and check on the characters from past books as well. I know that feeling. My first novel wasn’t meant to be a series, but the side characters kept shouting to me to write their stories!

Cancer features in several ways within this story, and is something that has touched
each and every one of us, as loved ones succumb, or even us ourselves. What
prompted you to use the big C within this story?

I often write about grief. I don’t know why, but it’s something that pulls at me every single
time. The connection to cancer came partly because of the heroine (Alex)’s job. My day job
is in university IP and I used to see so many cancer detection tests and cancer treatments
come up and then never get anywhere because there was no funding to take the
investigations further. So it fit very well into the rest of the story. Also, I already knew that Gihan’s mother had died from cancer, quite quickly, because it’s mentioned in Playing For
Love (where his sister is the main character).
My books often have a touch of darkness in them, but I think that’s okay, so long as there’s
a happy ending.

Gihan is a sweetheart, honestly, but I do think Penelope may have stolen the show
as a cute little pup! Do you like to write animals into your stories?

I should write more stories with dogs. I don’t often write about animals because I’m too lazy
to do the research to find out what it’s like keeping different pets. We had pet dogs when I
was little, so I guess I could write about dogs fairly easily. We had two pet rats until this
summer, so I could write about rats, I suppose (they’re very cute and full of personality).
Maybe one day.

I love to be nosy and ask this. What is next for Jeevani Charika? Any sequels, or new
projects you can tell us about?

The next book is called The Winner Bakes It All and it’s about Mal, who runs a keto/
low carb cafe and Elodie who runs a cake shop. They disagree about more than just
carbohydrates.
The book originally had a working title of ‘Man Buns’ but I wasn’t allowed to keep
that title, which is a pity.
One fun thing about writing about a guy who cooks keto food is that I was able to
mention the use of the ketogenic diet to control epilepsy. I’m mum to a keto kid, so I
know how lonely it is to be the mum that has to feed her kid specific foods that go
completely against the dietary advice we’ve been given all our lives. If the book helps
someone feel less alone in their daily measuring and calculating fat and carb ratios,
then that can only be a good thing.

That sounds really interesting, Jeev! I can’t wait to read it!

Right, looks like the biscuits are finished. We got through those fast! Thank you so much for coming over, today. It has been a pleasure. 😊

Thank you so much for having me today. 😊

The Blurb

Don’t miss this uplifting second-chance enemies-to-lovers romance from the author of RNA award-shortlisted Playing for Love! ❤️

Five years ago, Alex met the man of her dreams on New Year’s Eve – but he never called. Years later, and after a string of failed relationships, she’s given up on men and accepted that ‘New Year’s Eve Guy’ will always be the one who got away.

Until the day he turns up in her office – a management consultant tasked with ‘streamlining’ the company. New Year’s Eve Guy – Gihan – might shut down Alex’s team!

Gihan is as just as gorgeous as Alex remembers, and she swears there’s still a connection between them. As she gets to know the real Gihan, will sparks continue to fly – or will Alex have to accept that the man she knew as New Year’s Eve Guy was never real to start with?

Tropes:
❤️❤️Second chance love
💼 Office romance
⚔️Enemies to lovers
🏡Small town
🐶Cute dog friend!

Knowing Me Knowing You – https://books2read.com/KMKY

A Convenient Marriage – https://books2read.com/AConvenientMarriage

Christmas At The Palace – www.books2read.com/u/38g8aa

Girl On The Run (Rhoda Baxter) – https://books2read.com/mlKGaZ

My Review

Knowing Me Knowing You by Jeevani Charika
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Alex is a little unlucky in relationships. She seems to fall, a little too quickly, in love, and that can scare off a guy. After a particularly harsh break-up, one New Year’s Eve, she meets the perfect stranger, and after sharing some special moments, she never hears from him again.
Until five years later, when he turns up. At her workplace. With a high chance that he might recommend she be made redundant.
Gihan, the man in question, is a good guy, though. So many misunderstandings, both five years ago and during the course of a couple of months in the present, mean that he is not always shown in the best light to her.
It’s not so much enemies to lovers as misunderstood yearnings and missed chances.
There are references to cancer throughout which are dealt with sensitivity.
I love a bit of contemporary fiction that has South Asian representation in it, and Jeevani Charika does this well. She incorporates a little background and culture through the book while not making it about that very same thing. We see Gihan as a regular human, but also an insight into his cultural background. I especially liked the scene when he goes to the temple. I felt the serenity he felt.
This book continues the story of a side character from previous novels of the author, Picture Perfect, and Playing for Love; however, it is a standalone and can be read as such. I enjoy reading stories that have characters from other books intertwined within, as we see the progression of other familiar faces, as well as the story in hand.
A lovely read.

About the Author

Jeevani Charika is an award-nominated writer of multicultural women’s fiction and romcoms. She also writes under the pen name Rhoda Baxter. Her books have been shortlisted for various awards. One of these days, she’ll actually win one.Jeevani is British-Sri Lankan. She loves all things science geeky. She also loves cake, crochet and playing with Lego. You can find out more about her (and get a free book!) on her website. www.jeevanicharika.com

You can find out news about Jeevani by following her on social media.

Website: www.jeevanicharika.com

YouTube Playlist: http://bit.ly/canva4authors

instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeevanicharika/

@jeevanicharikaauthor