creature feature: jinn

I’ve always been fascinated by Arabian lore. When I was a kid, Disney’s Aladdin was one of my favorite films, and it still is. Since, I’ve devoured every Arabian tale I could find, anything that shares the folklore and mythology of the Middle East and South Asia. One Thousand and One Nights, or Arabian Nights, will probably always be my favorite collection of ancient myths and legends, easily favored over The Illiad, The Odyssey, and even the Prose Edda.

What fascinate me most are the creatures in Arabian mythology.

The jinn are the most famous of these creatures. There is one belief that every person is assigned their own jinn at birth, what we might consider a conscience but with both good and bad parts.

review: timeless

Timeless by Alexandra Monir

When tragedy strikes Michele Windsor’s world, she is forced to uproot her life and move across the country to New York City, to live with the wealthy, aristocratic grandparents she’s never met. In their old Fifth Avenue mansion filled with a century’s worth of family secrets, Michele discovers a diary that hurtles her back in time to the year 1910. There, in the midst of the glamorous Gilded Age, Michele meets the young man with striking blue eyes who has haunted her dreams all her life – a man she always wished was real, but never imagined could actually exist. And she finds herself falling for him, into an otherworldly, time-crossed romance.

Michele is soon leading a double life, struggling to balance her contemporary high school world with her escapes into the past. But when she stumbles upon a terrible discovery, she is propelled on a race through history to save the boy she loves – a quest that will determine the fate of both of their lives.

revising a manuscript - let it simmer

I’m going to have a short series on revisions, starting today. I’m not sure how many posts will be involved; there may in fact be several weeks’ worth. Only the future can tell us. Once we know for certain, I'll be sure to post a summary of everything.

You’ve finished the first draft of your novel.

*asplosion of confetti on your face*

more document organization

Work in drafts.

Now what do I mean by that?

When we start new stories, we generally create a new file with the working title of the story as the file name. That's all fine and dandy, but what do you do when you finish the draft and start revisions. Do you go back in the same file and begin making changes?

If that's you, stop. Stop what you're doing right now.

thematic endeavors

Now, all through school, when we'd finish reading a short story or novel for class, the teacher would ask, "what is the theme?"

Honestly, I never knew.

We find theme in the spaces between the writing, in the margins, and in the counters of individual letters. To really define the theme of a story, we have to ask hard questions:

What is the story really about? If you had to boil down its essence to a  single word or phrase, what would it be? What single idea or quality is it about? What are you trying to say?