Tag: book

8 Middle Eastern-Inspired Fantasy Reads

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The current book I’m writing draws from Middle Eastern folklore and mysticism, namely Jinns. As more books are published that draw from MidEastern themes, I’m devouring them as soon as I can. Not only for ideas for my books, but because of my Middle Eastern heritage: I love seeing my culture represented in literature that includes the mysticism, folklore, and fables! What a beautiful way to honor a rich and cultured history!

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic and dies at sea on the voyage from Poland. Chava is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York harbor in 1899.

Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire born in the ancient Syrian desert, trapped in an old copper flask, and released in New York City, though still not entirely free.

Ahmad and Chava become unlikely friends and soul mates with a mystical connection. Marvelous and compulsively readable, Helene Wecker’s debut novel The Golem and the Jinni weaves strands of Yiddish and Middle Eastern literature, historical fiction and magical fable, into a wondrously inventive and unforgettable tale. 

The Map of Salt and Stars by Zeyn Joukhadar

The story of two girls living eight hundred years apart—a modern-day Syrian refugee seeking safety and a medieval adventurer apprenticed to a legendary mapmaker.

It is the summer of 2011, and Nour has just lost her father to cancer. Her mother, a cartographer who creates unusual, hand-painted maps, decides to move Nour and her sisters from New York City back to Syria to be closer to their family. But the country Nour’s mother once knew is changing, and it isn’t long before protests and shelling threaten their quiet Homs neighborhood. When a shell destroys Nour’s house and almost takes her life, she and her family are forced to choose: stay and risk more violence or flee as refugees across seven countries of the Middle East and North Africa in search of safety. As their journey becomes more and more challenging, Nour’s idea of home becomes a dream she struggles to remember and a hope she cannot live without.

More than eight hundred years earlier, Rawiya, sixteen and a widow’s daughter, knows she must do something to help her impoverished mother. Restless and longing to see the world, she leaves home to seek her fortune. Disguising herself as a boy named Rami, she becomes an apprentice to al-Idrisi, who has been commissioned by King Roger II of Sicily to create a map of the world. In his employ, Rawiya embarks on an epic journey across the Middle East and the north of Africa where she encounters ferocious mythical beasts, epic battles, and real historical figures.

An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

Laia is a slave. Elias is a soldier. Neither is free.
 
Under the Martial Empire, defiance is met with death. Those who do not vow their blood and bodies to the Emperor risk the execution of their loved ones and the destruction of all they hold dear.
 
It is in this brutal world, inspired by ancient Rome, that Laia lives with her grandparents and older brother. The family ekes out an existence in the Empire’s impoverished backstreets. They do not challenge the Empire. They’ve seen what happens to those who do.
 
But when Laia’s brother is arrested for treason, Laia is forced to make a decision. In exchange for help from rebels who promise to rescue her brother, she will risk her life to spy for them from within the Empire’s greatest military academy.
 
There, Laia meets Elias, the school’s finest soldier—and secretly, its most unwilling. Elias wants only to be free of the tyranny he’s being trained to enforce. He and Laia will soon realize that their destinies are intertwined—and that their choices will change the fate of the Empire itself.

A Torch Against the Night by Sabaa Tahir

Elias and Laia are running for their lives. After the events of the Fourth Trial, Martial soldiers hunt the two fugitives as they flee the city of Serra and undertake a perilous journey through the heart of the Empire.

Laia is determined to break into Kauf—the Empire’s most secure and dangerous prison—to save her brother, who is the key to the Scholars’ survival. And Elias is determined to help Laia succeed, even if it means giving up his last chance at freedom.

But dark forces, human and otherworldly, work against Laia and Elias. The pair must fight every step of the way to outsmart their enemies: the bloodthirsty Emperor Marcus, the merciless Commandant, the sadistic Warden of Kauf, and, most heartbreaking of all, Helene—Elias’s former friend and the Empire’s newest Blood Shrike.

Bound to Marcus’s will, Helene faces a torturous mission of her own—one that might destroy her: find the traitor Elias Veturius and the Scholar slave who helped him escape…and kill them both.

A Reaper at the Gates by Sabaa Tahir

Beyond the Empire and within it, the threat of war looms ever larger.

The Blood Shrike, Helene Aquilla, is assailed on all sides. Emperor Marcus, haunted by his past, grows increasingly unstable, while the Commandant capitalizes on his madness to bolster her own power. As Helene searches for a way to hold back the approaching darkness, her sister’s life and the lives of all those in the Empire hang in the balance.

Far to the east, Laia of Serra knows the fate of the world lies not in the machinations of the Martial court, but in stopping the Nightbringer. But while hunting for a way to bring him down, Laia faces unexpected threats from those she hoped would aid her, and is drawn into a battle she never thought she’d have to fight.

And in the land between the living and the dead, Elias Veturius has given up his freedom to serve as Soul Catcher. But in doing so, he has vowed himself to an ancient power that will stop at nothing to ensure Elias’s devotion–even at the cost of his humanity.

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups—from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the state’s electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line. Then it turns out his lover’s new fiancé is the “Hand of God,” as they call the head of state security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground.

When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen.

A Thousand Nights by E.K. Johnston

Lo-Melkhiin killed three hundred girls before he came to her village, looking for a wife. When she sees the dust cloud on the horizon, she knows he has arrived. She knows he will want the loveliest girl: her sister. She vows she will not let her be next.

And so she is taken in her sister’s place, and she believes death will soon follow. Lo-Melkhiin’s court is a dangerous palace filled with pretty things: intricate statues with wretched eyes, exquisite threads to weave the most beautiful garments. She sees everything as if for the last time. But the first sun rises and sets, and she is not dead. Night after night, Lo-Melkhiin comes to her and listens to the stories she tells, and day after day she is awoken by the sunrise. Exploring the palace, she begins to unlock years of fear that have tormented and silenced a kingdom. Lo-Melkhiin was not always a cruel ruler. Something went wrong.

Far away, in their village, her sister is mourning. Through her pain, she calls upon the desert winds, conjuring a subtle unseen magic, and something besides death stirs the air.

Back at the palace, the words she speaks to Lo-Melkhiin every night are given a strange life of their own. Little things, at first: a dress from home, a vision of her sister. With each tale she spins, her power grows. Soon she dreams of bigger, more terrible magic: power enough to save a king, if she can put an end to the rule of a monster.

Fatma: A Novel of Arabia by Raja Alem

Fatma, an Arabian peasant girl, unwittingly embarks upon a strange journey of transformation the day her father marries her off to a snake handler with a sideline in potions brewed from venom. When Fatma is bitten by one of the snakes, she is changed from an innocent girl into an overpoweringly sensuous woman with a mysterious talent for controlling her husband’s snakes and an ability to travel with them into realms beyond ordinary human experience.” “Journeying into the Netherworld with her snakes, Fatma meets Prince Taray, a melancholoy warrior-hero. She and Taray bewitch each other and struggle toward union in rapturous rituals during which, among other things, Fatma alternately bursts into flames and melts into golden liquid.” Resonating with ritual and mystery, Fatma is a tale of one woman’s path to ecstasy – an enraptured vision of enchantment in this world and fulfillment in another. 

*Cover image from Graphic Art News: http://www.graphicart-news.com/amazing-arabic-graffiti-collection-in-a-book/#.Xa3qsOdKjxg

Revision is re-envisioning

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There’s nothing akin to the agony of editing your book. This suffering goes beyond the whole “kill your darlings” because, at least for me, I’ll gladly kill my darlings if it means saving my book.

No, the agony for me is the one thousand and one revisions my book has to go through. I already did one revision, which was a sweep of the book, pulling out scenes and sentences, and adding new ones if I saw fit. It was more of a holistic approach, which I completed in a week.

However, the next two weeks are going to be me focusing on dun dun dun: setting. The setting that I apparently failed to convey when I wrote my first draft. The setting that I’m going to have to describe beautifully if I want my book to work. The setting that I’m not sure how to describe.

However, to keep sane I think the best approach I can take to my editing is to do a number of revisions, each time focusing on one aspect:

Revision 1: Holistic: Go through the book, reacquaint yourself with the details and the scenes, and try pulling out what doesn’t work. Gut your work. Kill your darlings, or if that’s too gory a thought for you, lay your darlings to rest in a beautiful silk-lined casket and set them out to sea. Focus on sentence structure, grammar, punctuation, so that when you move on to other revisions, you aren’t distracted by those sorts of things.

Gut your work

Revision 2: Setting: Weave the senses into your book. Don’t overdo it, but make your reader feel, with all their senses, your scenes. Focus more on adding in sound, sight, temperature, touch, color, tactile experiences, wetness, dryness, humidity, solidness, softness, dampness, harshness, anything that brings your world to life. Describe something as being chestnut-colored instead of brown. Describe the sound as tinkling instead of light and airy. Describe the feel of the cliff under her hands as she climbed it, instead of saying only that she grunted. Make the setting active, interacting with the characters, or having the characters interact with it. Don’t just have the setting be a backdrop that is barely noticeable. Bring out the life of your setting. View your setting as its own character, and I think you will do well.

View your setting as its own character

Revision 3: Focus on the emotions of your character. Now that you have the setting down, make sure your character responds to it. Your character’s setting should challenge them, interact with them, push them, reward them, punish them, twist them around and make them dizzy. Make your character a part of the setting, and make the setting a part of your character. Have your characters and their setting hold hands. Focus on events: how do your characters behave? Do they only react? They should do more than just react to events; they should create events, change events. Emotions fuel your character. Emotions and actions are your character. Your character is nothing without emotion, unless your character is all about not having emotions.

Have your characters and their setting hold hands.

Your character is nothing without emotion, unless your character is all about not having emotions.

Revision 4: Focus on plotholes. Are there any? Does everything make sense chronologically, assuming time works in your book as it does in our world. Is your plot fluid? Your plot should not only make sense, it should be interesting, have twists, and bewitch a reader.

Your plot should not only make sense, it should be interesting, have twists, and bewitch a reader.

Revision 5: World-recreation. Make sure your world fits in with your setting, and that everything is interactive. You could probably do this during the setting revision, but it should be its own focus at some point. Is your world a sprawling expanse, or s single room in a lonely house? Either way, make sure that your world is interesting for both your characters and your readers. Interesting doesn’t have to mean unique or out-of-this-world. It could be boring, really, in the sense that you character is bored by their world. Regardless, make your world alive for your readers and interactive with them. Your world should be a reflection of your characters’ behaviors. That is, your world should not be separate from your characters, but a part of their feelings and actions.

Your world should be a reflection of your characters’ behaviors.

Revision 6: Be a seamstress. Bring all the pieces together. Do another holistic revision. Do all the pieces fit together? Have you woven your strands with golden thread? If not, it’s back to step 2.

Revision 7: Let it sit. I think letting go of your story, even if only for a few weeks, is a revision in and of itself. By letting it sit, and moving on to something else to clear your mind, you’re letting your brain distance itself from the details so that when you come back to your story, you can look at it with fresh eyes and from a big-picture perspective.

Let it sit.

Revision 8: Read through your book, and holistically attend to all those previous steps mentioned. It’s holistic in a way you haven’t done before, even in step 6. This time, you’ve spent time away from your MS and can focus on the bigger picture and the general themes of your story, your characters, setting, and everything else you should have already attend to, but can now do with fresh eyes and mind. Give your book one more holistic revision, and focus on the big picture. Remember that revision is re-envisioning.

Remember that revision is re-envisioning.

*Note: This article was originally published on January 19, 2016.

**Header image courtesy of Google images.

Hakawati Jinn – Chapter Three

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NEW BOOK ALERT!

I’m working on a new book and want YOUR feedback! Each week, I’ll post a new chapter, and want you to provide your thoughts, opinions, feeling, and feedback on the chapter.

Be brutally honest.

Layala slips into the house that night far later than she’s allowed to be out. 

“Maman?” she whispers. I pretend to be asleep but watch her from my cot. She has a smile on her face, one that stops my heart for a breath. It’s the smile of a young girl in love. 

I want to reach out to her, to tell her that love will come, more mature love, and to wait. But I know it’ll be no use; I had that love at her age, who am I to begrudge her it. 

Instead, I let her be, and stay up the rest of the night, counting my prayer beads and asking a wish-prayer on each one. 

Keep her safe.

Keep her happy. 

Let her find good love.

Let her know peace. 

Let her know her heart and mind. 

Let her be. 

It’s a prayer I’ve said for Layala since before she was born. 

Before the sun has even had a chance to yawn, Layala is up and about, setting tea, kneading dough, and laying out the zaatar and oil we will eat for breakfast. 

“Layl, you’re up early,” I say. 

“Sabah al kheer, maman.” Good morning. 

“Your father won’t be here for another two hours, at least,” I add.

Layala ignores me, humming and smiling to herself. I want to know who the boy is. But though the words hover on my lips, I don’t ask her. Let her tell me in her own time. 

“Off to jido’s?” I say, when we’re done eating and she slips on her velvety blue robe. It’s one reserved for special occasions, though we rarely have those. 

She nods, but her cheeks flush red with the lie. I wonder if I should send a hawk out to follow her. I decide I will. 

As soon as Layala dashes out the door, barely a goodbye on her lips, I take a clay ochre-hued hawk from the shelf and run my hands over it. 

Its eyes flash open and I set it down on the table, watching it grow to full size. 

“Watch over my girl, Saqr,” I tell it, weaving the words in the air with my fingers and letting them sink into the hawk’s fresh feathers. 

Its eyes glint and in the next breath, it’s out the door and streaking into the sky. 

I grab my basket and go outside the gather the pomegranate seeds from the night before. The basket feels heavy this morning, though there are fewer seeds than normal. Just a few handfuls of dead souls, but as I carry the basket on my hip, my bones feel weighed down.

Sighing, I slip into the house and shut the door behind me. Again I press the seeds into a juice and again I drink that juice. Every morning of every day, for fourteen years.

The stories are sharp, cutting through me like daggers. I pour in extra honey, stirring it in until I can no longer taste pomegranate, only bee’s nectar. 

I catch the tail of one story, and it surprises me. I know this woman, an old one from the village next door. She used to cook for my family, when we were wealthy and jinns were respected. 

But like every other soul, her story is told through images, through symbols that make little sense, even put together. The images of her life fade into the story of a pearl tree. 

The pearl tree stood alone in the center of a poor man’s garden. 

It dropped iridescent pearls every morning, but if the man got too close, branches whipped out to slap him. Pearls at his feet, and not one to sell in the markets. 

Still, the man tried every so often to snatch just one pearl. But each effort left him with a welt across the face and a gash on his arm. 

One day, the man grew so angry he decided to cut down the tree. He took an axe to its roots, dashed them into pieces, and gathered the pearls. One basket, two, then three were filled with the pearls. 

The tree lay in ruin, however, its once proud trunk a stump in the garden. Its branches lay scattered about, hacked into pieces. 

The man smiled to himself, thinking of all the riches he would buy. New teeth to replace the ones he sold for a bit of coin to buy his food. New shoes to protect his rough bare feet from being cut on stones along the road. A new house, with a roof that didn’t leak. And, most of all, a wife. A beautiful one, to be dressed in jewels and dresses fit for a rani.

But when the man checked on his baskets later in the day, he found nothing but ash. He pulled at his thin hair, ripping it out in clumps. 

And in the midst of his bawling, a knock sounded at his door. 

He snatched the door open, finding the kingdom’s prince standing at his door. 

“I have heard tales of a magic tree that drops pearls instead of leaves. Do you know of this tree?”

“Why do you ask?” said the man.

“I wish to plant it in my own gardens. I will pay handsomely for it.”

The old man glanced behind the prince, at the severed pieces of the pearl tree. 

“You did this?” the prince said, following the man’s gaze. 

The man nodded, tears welling up in his eyes.

“Stupid, stupid man,” the prince said. “Do you know what you’ve done? That tree, those pearls, they are the dead. The souls of our dead. Without that tree, the dead cannot pass to the next life. They will become ghouls, wandering the earth, wreaking havoc on it.”

And just as the man hacked at the tree, the prince’s soldiers cut down the man. They gathered the pieces of the tree, hoping upon hope that there was some magic in the world that could heal it. 

The story ends there, and I am none the wiser to its meaning. Still, I sense the woman clutching her story to her breast, worth more to her than gold to the living. Her dead spirit understands the tale more than my living one could. I sense her gratitude, like sun on a cold winter day, and then I feel the thread between us cut. 

“Allah ma’eek”, I whisper. God with you. She’s paid her way into Mote with our tale; she will have everlasting peace now. 

I turn back to my juice and drink the rest, weaving each story as lovingly as I can. The morning spread apart into the afternoon before I am through. Night falls, and still Layala hasn’t returned home. 

Saqr? I think, Where is she? I pad over to the door, sticking my head outside. I glance expectantly at the stony pathway to our house, hoping to find Layala on it. But it’s empty save for a rabbit who hops away into the woods beyond. 

The hawk shoots in through the door, landing deftly on the table. 

“Tell me,” I say, laying my hand lightly on its back. 

I see flashes of Layl as Saqr followed her. She walks through town, her velvet hook up to hide her face. Smart girl. 

She walks into a ribbon shop, leaving empty-handed. Then she wanders more around town, looking at the wares, her face always hidden from others’ views. 

Until she stops at the edge of the market, and instead of turning back home, she continues on. She walks to the village over, her steps growing lighter, more skips than steps now. She’s happy. 

And then she stops at a door, glancing around as if not wanting anyone to see her. She knocks, once, twice, before the door swings open. I see a hand, pale with long fingers grip my daughter’s arm and pull her in. 

Saqr’s view shifts, now glancing through the window of the house. Layala is inside, sitting by a fire, her cloak off. Her face is in full view of a boy. Just as I expected. 

But this is no ordinary boy. He is one made of smoke, hair tipped with flames. His face is pale, his eyes dark, and his teeth shine with silver. He is no ordinary boy for he a jinn. 

And jinns are trouble. 

My beta reader likes my first draft!

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I am so happy! A wonderful beta reader I’ve hired before has always had a lot of (very useful) critiques about my manuscripts in the past. But since I started a new book, I decided to send her the first 25 chapters of my manuscript.

And she had wonderful news about it! This came in perfect timing because I’ve been feeling down about my book all week, and last night, ripped out the last 12 chapters I wrote.

But her words are motivating me to take back up the keyboard and type on!

Here you go! I am beyond impressed by this piece! You’ve improved so much, it’s like a different writer! (Your last work was good, don’t get me wrong, but this is on a whole other level.) If I were an agent and saw these first pages, you better believe I’d want more. It’s so clean, too. I am just raving about this. Up until the final two chapters, I had almost no complaints. Keep up the good work!

Make no mistake, she gave me TONS to work on, so I have my work cut out for me. But her words are so uplifting, especially as I usually hire a beta after I’ve completed a manuscript. This time, I decided to hire midway so I don’t waste time doing the wrong thing for 50+ chapters and 300+ pages. I’m so glad I did.

I wrote a book!

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(but it’s not published…yet!)

Mistlyn is published in full on Wattpad.com and I’ve entered it into Wattys 2019 awards!

The only way thirteen-year-old Mistlyn can bring her dead village back to life is by going with a conniving Jinn to the world of the dead, the Realm of Mote.

The only survivors of their burned village, Mistlyn and her best friend, Sahria, are captured and held prisoner by the Lizsard People. Sahria is forced to be a court dancer, while Mistlyn has been forced to sit on two eggs that are said to contain the life force of the seven races of earth. But once the eggs hatch and another three days have passed, Mistlyn will no longer be needed by the Lizsard King.

Before anything further can happen to her, Mistlyn is convinced to leave with the Jinn who promises to help her escape and bring her family back to life – if she does a favor for him. But the Jinn isn’t the one Mistlyn has to worry about…

Check it out, like, comment, and share! ❤