Hi friends. It’s been a while.

Honestly, I haven’t had much energy lately to post much of anything, not the least of which a well-thought out blog post that’s worth sending out. Arguably, I don’t have the energy to write this one, but I’ll try to put down my thoughts regardless.

It’s been a horrible year. The world seems on fire, in some places, quite literally, including in Palestine/Israel, Syria, Turkey, California, Oregon, and other places. It seems the entire world is ablaze literally, and certainly, figuratively.

Palestine is under 22 months of siege, genocide, Israeli-engineered famine, and, as scholars are saying, a holocaust. Syria is under attack by Israel, including in Damascus and in southern Syria, where Druze populations are. Lebanon is precarious, with ongoing threats of attacks from Israel. Never mind our perilous situation in the United States, with Trump’s orders to send in the National Guard into DC, of which I saw groups of 3 or 5 roaming the National Mall and metro stations just two weekends ago.

It’s a scary time, and that’s not even going into the assaults on women, queer, Indigenous, Black, and other lives in America alone.

(BTW, there’s a bookish auction ongoing to raise funds for immigrant and trans rights, through August 27th).

With everything going on, I’ve continued to write, but I feel a bit…dead…inside, like I’m mostly a shell of a person right now. Creatively, I’m still doing work, but I can feel both body and mind slowing down, grieving, and, frankly, retracting, even as I try to reach out to people more. It’s a fine line between staying informed, trying to do work that can contribute to a healthy society, and protecting myself from the constant onslaught of horrible events. No wonder my recent Youtube watches have been on nomading through the US in a car, finding a couple acres to build a homestead on, and relaxing book recommendations coupled with homemade pastries and teas.

I have a few projects I’ve been working on, including a few novels, and one semi-memoir/social commentary on Arab-American discrimination and racism. They’re in different stages of creation, some I’m in the throes of edits for, others I’m still doing research for.

However, a short spread in a comic issue is coming out, a story on imperialism’s actions on collective memory and the rewriting of history. The story comes out in Planet Comics: Book Six, which you can back on Kickstarter. The work has hit full funding, but if you’d like a copy, feel free to back the project. It should come out in November-ish of this year.

Here’s a bit on my piece:

Rania Hanna (author of The Jinn Daughter), Erin Dodge and Ari Pluchinsky bring us the single-issue story, “The Archivist of Al-Azrakh”!

Signing off for now, and maybe for a while,
Rania