About
Delson Armstrong was born in Bombay, India (he prefers to call his hometown by its anglicized name) on March 9th, 1990 and moved to the US in 1995.
At an early age, Delson was encouraged to read as many books as he could, which fuelled his imagination and sparked the desire to become a full time writer. He began writing short stories and enjoyed the class fiction writing assignments he was given, which helped him to develop his skills as a writer. It also made him really look into pursuing writing as a serious craft, and the first time he thought of doing that was in the sixth grade when he was around eleven. He began to outline The Falsifier and based many of the characters on his friends in school, but left it that for some time.
He went back to India to and attended Pathways World School for three years in Gurgaon and then moved to Bombay. There he pursued the idea for the book once again and continued writing, rewriting and finally finished in 2008. But that was not the end. He knew the story was not going to fit in one book and as he explored the history of the characters and the history of the Vampires in the novel, he realized it spanned a timeline of 150,000 years. That was a lot of stories to tell! And now, he has decided he wants to tell all of them, or at least the highlights, in an epic fourteen book saga.
He currently transits between New York and Bombay, spending equal amounts of time in both cities and embracing the best of both cultures as well as soaking in the inspirations he encounters daily.
He enjoys practicing yoga, meditation and philosophy, as well as classical music. His favorite composers include Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Chopin and he plays the piano occasionally, wishing he could find more time to continue his practice. He is also a major film buff and watches movies all weekend long every week with his family and is currently working on some screenplays, one of which he wrote during a year online at the New York Film Academy.
Description
<p>A mythical jewel of a story… A true story told on a beach in Yucatan, A Shadow tells Stephanie's story but it was also the story of the golden time. Its nostalgia sings like cicadas in the heat.</p><p>An American ‘Under Milkwood’, this distilled novel of the Sixties evokes the sounds, music and optimism on the free-wheelin streets and parks of Coconut Grove. You can hear Bob Dylan still strumming acoustic; smoke a joint with Fred Neil; and Everybody’s Talkin is carried on the wind.</p><p>Stephanie, a young hairdresser living in lodgings finds herself pregnant. Refused help from her hard Catholic mother in New York, unable to abort her baby, she accepts the kindness of Miriam, her Jewish landlady, whose own barren life spills into compassionate assistance for the daughter she never had.</p><p>The poignancy of its ending, its generosity and acceptance, echoes the bitter disappointment of those of us who hoped for so much more, but who remember its joy, and its promise, as though untarnished by time.</p>
Story Behind The Book
The reason why The Falsifier and ultimately the rest of the fourteen book saga came to be was because of my constant fear of vampires. I remember reading Dracula at a quite impressionable age and watching many vampire flicks. But there was one particular book, I remember, which I took out from the local library that gave me chronic nightmares and even possibly insomnia! I just couldn’t sleep. The images in the book were so scary and yet so fascinating to me that I thought they’d jump off the page! At one point, I couldn’t even muster up the courage to look at the book. It was that fear which later transmuted into a fascination for the mythic creatures. I started reading other books on vampires, like the ones by Anne Rice (yes at eleven!), and I started to fall in love with them. This was what made me want to write a book. At first, it was a way to pass time with my friends during recess, where I’d write short stories and sometimes even enact sections from these stories with them. But then, it got me thinking— I wanted to write a serious, grand book, which I soon outlined. I left the outline for some time, pursuing other things and moving to India for a while, after facing a few racial backlashes in school. That’s where I suppose the idea of racial tolerance was imbibed into the book later on. I took up writing the book again and finally finished in 2008.
I remember in some parts of The Falsifier, there are political speeches which I wrote that were inspired by some speeches given by George W. Bush, during his presidency and the War on Terror, and the speeches of Barack Obama, leading up to his inaugural address.
It can be said that certain situation and events in the book are based on the War on Terror, the racial and religious intolerance post 9/11 and the ever-changing immigration policies of the United States. Of course, some of these events are pushed to their limits, to see what the mind’s eye could perceive if certain negativities were achieved in reality.
Reviews
<p style="margin:0in 0in 0pt;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman';">“A sprawling epic…action packed and romantic…twists through vast swathes of time, space and metaphysics. A great read for sci-fi lovers everywhere.” — award winning filmmaker and author Martin Simpson.<br /><br /><br /><br /></span></p>
