An apology might not be considered a conversation starter. But, theatre and film actor Vivaan Shah, most remembered for his role in Farah Khan's heist comedy Happy New Year, offers oodles of it when he misses our call due to a network issue in Dharamshala, where he is currently shooting for a film. With this, he puts to rest our misgivings about indulgent star kids. Because 29-year-old Shah, the youngest child of veteran actors Naseeruddin and Ratna Pathak Shah, would rather see himself as a struggler. Or, at least that's how his new literary career seems to have panned out.

Shah, whose debut novel, Living Hell (Penguin Random House), a crime thriller set in the seedy underbelly of Mumbai, hit the stands this week, says it took him nearly five years and a whole lot of self-introspection, before getting published. "Unlike my brother [Imaad], who is a bookworm, I was not a huge reader as a child. I was a very visual person and had more inclination towards drawing. It was only in my early 20s, when I was getting into theatre and looking for new material to perform onstage, that I started reading up works of Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft," says Shah. "It's somewhere around that time that I fell in love with words, and started trying to write. But, a lot of what I was creating was pretty derivative. It sounded a lot like Poe and the other writers I was inspired by."