New Short Story: The Hidden Ones

One of my short stories, The Hidden Ones, has been accepted for the April edition of The Write Launch! You can read this magical realism story set in Bahrain, here:
​https://thewritelaunch.com/2018/03/the-hidden-ones/. 

​Once again, I'm skipping with joy at another turning point in my writing career - publishing a short story! Like my literary agent search, I went through the usual ups and downs with a number of my short stories - submissions, rejections, rinse and repeat. But I kept at it, polished my stories in places where they needed work, and got smarter about where and how to submit. And finally, a breakthrough. 

​This particular story is especially rewarding to publish, given how personal it is. Most of my writing is straight science fiction - spaceships, future technology, parallel universes. The Hidden Ones is more immediate, drawing from Middle Eastern folklore and my own upbringing in Bahrain. 

​As a result, I thought I'd share a few personal details behind this story:

• ​If you grew up in the West, you have probably heard of the jinn referenced in the story by another name - genies. While they aren't blue and voiced by Robin Williams, the jinn are a concept that have been around since pre-Islamic Arabia. The word means "to conceal", hence the name of my story - The Hidden Ones.  As a science fiction writer, I've developed a fascination with them, just as a concept of beings from another dimension, but ones that influence our world. 
• Ever since I moved to Bahrain as a child, there has always been some degree of unrest on the island. Sometimes, it was just sporadic demonstrations and riots in villages, where the local Shiite population comprise a persecuted majority that face employment, educational and religious discrimination. After the Arab Spring picked up, the unrest in Bahrain swelled. When one of the iconic monuments on the island, an elevated Pearl statue in the center of a main roundabout, became a focal point for demonstrations, the government tore it down. The removal affected me to a surprising degree - it was part of the landscape of the island in my mind, removed by a series of unanticipated, cascading events. It gave me the idea of an unchangeable, unseen force on the island, unmarred by politics and sectarian conflicts - a jinni who impacts each of my characters in a different way, depending on their role in this new climate. 
  
• Kamel, my main character, is torn between the growing modernization on the island of Bahrain and the conservative forces trying to turn back the clock. Part of that stemmed from my own multicultural upbringing. Both American and Arab, I always felt like an interloper for both cultures - never entirely one or the other. More of a spectator - like Kamel with his camera.
  
• ​On a lighter note - the climactic scene where the riot breaks out near the school is based on a real event at the British school I went to in Bahrain. We were summoned into the gym, some calm and some panicking, only unlike the story, we all finished the day and went back to class. It inspired some vivid memories, however - particular our school's headmaster (principal, for American readers), who scowled at us as though warning us not to panic. And so we didn't. ​

​Hope you read and enjoyed it. With a few more science fiction and magical realism stories in progress (or out on submission), I'm hoping that more opportunities for publication are around the corner. Watch this space!