Writeblr focused on motivating and inspiring myself, as well as sharing my excitement during the writing process. I enjoy writing fantasy and (often gothic-tinged) horror.
I am a twenty-something muslimah who never manages to write as often as I tell myself I will. Prone to attributing my lack of writing to "extensive research." Both my faith and academic background in social science influence my writing, and I have a predilection for including creature creations in my stories.
Most of my creative endeavors fall within the realm of epic fantasy. The world building is often influenced by Middle Eastern and South Asian societies, with the occasional exception. Think 'The Sands of Arawiya' meets the 'Kingkiller Chronicle' and that's my niche.
I dabble in horror featuring themes + motifs of the gothic & thrilling variety.
I love literature, but don't have plans to write within the genre, outside one deeply personal coming of age novel.
More about some of my projects can be found below, in order of priority/progress.
Novel length WIPs:
Epic fantasy with the highest word count to date: Do you like political scheming, sophisticated magic systems, found family, far-spanning adventure in a captivating world, and a female protagonist dead set on retribution even if it means burning the world alive? I am not usually a romantic, but this story takes an enemies to lovers turn I wasn't planning in a very Pride and Prejudice-esque manner.
Academic fantasy with minor steam punk elements. It's like if Rage Against the Machine existed in an authoritarian state and challenged colonialism with secret libraries, secret societies, and forbidden knowledge. Imagine if the bastard lovechild of His Dark Materials and V for Vendetta went through an epic fantasy phase... sort of.
The aforementioned literary coming of age novel: YA lit coming of age story revolving around the identity struggles of a teenage girl who finds, in true coming-of-age-trope fashion, she fits "neither here nor there." Themes of generational trauma and culture vs. religion, explorations of deviance, gender, conformity, redemption, and how [various types of] privilege inform our interactions with the world around us compose the underpinnings of this novel. This is my WIP that is so heavy I'm almost afraid to touch it for fear it will shatter if I drop it.
Novella and short story WIPs:
Do you like unreliable narrators, spine-tingling, eye-watering terror, psychological suspense, and hauntings all wrapped up into a period piece package? This story may be for you!
Do you like dark fantasy twists on classic mythology? How about character driven narratives featuring explorations fate vs. free will within the context of generational trauma? The tenebrous mood of this project is what really makes it. Oh, and the dragon.
This one is for those of us who enjoy a good slow decline into madness.
Timeless bonds and plot twists, anyone!?
Middle grade fiction WIP:
The Creature Chronicles. Need I say more? Well, if you insist... In a magical and geographically diverse realm of stratified land masses, an overwhelming variety of fauna and flora make their homes on, in, and above their world. Our main character is an adventurous scholar who has set out with their currently-blank field guide to document all the life they encounter. True to form, every adventure must be full of danger, excitement, wonder, and the friends we make along the way, and this little project ticks allllll the boxes, buddy.
Please keep interacting with this post because when I come to tumblr to procrastinate, this shows up again in my notifications and guilts me into writing again
see this person is the love of my life I would follow them anywhere every day is brighter for having them in it. and THIS bastard shares a soul with me we'll find each other in every universe and understand each other in ways no other living being could. neither of us are particularly thrilled about this
in 2026, remember how GOOD writing feels. remember how satsfying it is to get your characters to the point you have been dying to get to, where they will experience the love, fear, relief or whatever the feeling you want to bring to life may be. let this year be the year of writing, prgress and of satisfactory endings.
Let’s not forget that he was played on screen by a white man. And the fact that he was black is barely ever mentioned or the book he wrote inspired by his experiences.
chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.
grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet
he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.
even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).
(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)
famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”
for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.
and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.
when this post first went around (a year ago apparently) I was like BUT WHAT ABOUT DADDY DUMAS THOUGH because basically
daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman
he invaded egypt
the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”
then napoleon showed up
napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus
the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”
this did not make napoleon happy
in fact it made him jealous
napoleon felt so emasculated that he launched a campaign of revenge against General Dumas, including taking away his pension, that probably inspired a lot of Alexandre’s rather satisfying scenes in which fathers are nobly avenged and the money-grubbing villains are rubbed in the mud
His stuff is in the public domain, you can find them on Project Gutenberg here:
Project Gutenberg offers 73,007 free eBooks for Kindle, iPad, Nook, Android, and iPhone.
And for those of you who would like to try audio versions, this is what is on LibriVox, the free, volunteer run audiobook version of Project Gutenberg:
