Blog
Alumni Spotlight: Aditi Bhide Publishes Her Debut Novel, Secrets of the Monsoon Sky
by Writing Workshops Staff
2 weeks ago
“Writers cannot afford to be islands.”
Aditi Bhide spent five years on a novel. Now that it is out in the world, she says she is practicing “the art of letting go’.” That is harder than it sounds. Writers hold on. Bhide let go on October 11, 2026, when Secrets of the Monsoon Sky went on sale from Vibe NW Books, and a few weeks later she answered our alumni survey with the clear head of someone who has done the work and handed it over.
Bhide was born in Sangli, India, and grew up hiking the forts and peaks of the Sahyadri mountains. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, and spends a few months each year in Mumbai. She came to fiction after a long run of corporate communications jobs at companies big and small. In 2020, she made her first creative sale: a short story called “Destiny’s Daughters,” picked up by a local theater for its production of International Horror Stories. In 2025, she was a finalist in the Pacific Northwest Writers Association contest for unpublished writers, which she says is what pushed the novel toward publication. She is a member of Willamette Writers and reads for writing contests when asked. Her website has the rest.
She took her first class with us in 2022: an eight-week fiction craft workshop. After that, she turned her attention to the business side. She took a query-letter seminar, Mark Owen Gottlieb’s Mastering the Submissions Process to Get a Literary Agent, a two-session Zoom seminar from a Trident Media Group agent on how to build a pitch package and what actually happens after you send it. Bhide names that seminar as the moment that still shapes her work. It was crucial, she says, for understanding the publishing industry and how it operates. For a writer who had been building a historical novel in private for years, learning how the machine worked from the inside changed the terms of the project.
Then, in the spring of 2025, she did something that looks like a detour and probably wasn’t. She enrolled in Diana Spechler’s four-week Writing Essays About Travel & Food. “My travel writing class with Diana Spechler was just terrific fun,” she told us. “Both have taken my writing forward.” Read the novel, and you can see why a travel and food class belongs on the path to it: the book runs on sensory detail, the smell of a monsoon arriving, the bazaars, the particular dread of a dining car with the wrong people in it. What Bhide liked about the classes was practical. They were online, there was room for questions, and they made her feel like part of a writing community rather than a visitor to one.
Secrets of the Monsoon Sky opens in England in 1917. Eartha Rae has lived her whole life in institutions, an orphanage and then a war hospital, when a letter arrives from a woman in India claiming to be her aunt. She sails for Bombay and lands in Chandangudi, a small British station where the memsahibs keep stricter rules than anyone back home, an eccentric uncle guards his grief, a Marathi teacher treats her as a person rather than a servant-class orphan, and the first stirrings of the home rule movement are audible from the veranda. Bhide handles the Raj without easy villains. The cruelty in the book is mostly polite, and it costs Eartha dearly. Society Nineteen, Suzanne Fox’s journal of fiction about the long nineteenth century, called it a richly detailed debut about family identity, cultural tension, and historic change. Early readers on Goodreads keep bringing up the same two things: the vividness of the setting and the hope that there is a sequel.
Her advice for writers on the fence about taking a class is the line at the top of this post, and she means it as a working method. “Take workshops and classes because they help you connect with your tribe,” she wrote. “Then you can go back to your desk brimming with ideas.” Her secret weapon for the hard stretches is the opposite of grinding: step away from the work for a while and come back to it.
Bhide is in the promotion stretch now, which is its own kind of letting go. She hasn’t said what comes next. She signed off with a line that could serve as a motto for the whole five-year effort: “Here’s to doing what you love, and then letting it go! Cheers!”
Bhide took a craft workshop, two publishing seminars, and an essay class with us over three years, and she did the rest herself. If you have a manuscript in a drawer and a question about what to do with it, our online workshops and seminars are a good place to ask it.
Browse Online Classes
