Caroline’s Blog – Page 4

The Amber Genie

Since starting this website I’ve been going through my work to see which stories I would be happy sharing with the world. It’s taking time because I’m often interrupted by a baby deciding they’re hungry or a toddler needing my attention!

However, I’ve recently added The Amber Genie – click here to check it out.

This is a story that I wrote with the intention that it would be part one of a three part novel/novella, with each part focusing on one of three women who were known as the amber genie. I haven’t managed to finish parts two and three as yet, but the first part can also be read as a standalone story, so I figured I might as well upload it.

The idea for the amber genie started with me learning more about the myth of the djinn. The myth originated in the Middle East, though my understanding is that the origins are a bit muddy. They’re referred to in the Quran but also in pre-Islamic literature and it seems that the ideas about them mixed up with various different beliefs about spirits over time. They were powerful spirits who were worshipped but also seen as being similar to humans, and they could be both benevolent and malevolent.

My understanding (feel free to correct me, any experts out there) is that djinn, or genies, became associated with wish granting after the publication of One Thousand and One Nights and our notion of the wish granting genie in a ring is a largely Western concept that’s become more developed over time with popular fiction.

With The Amber Genie I wanted to capture a bit of a mix of the modern Western concepts with the older ideas. Dembe, the focus of this story, is both a benevolent nature spirit and a genie in a ring, offering humans the possibility of vast power. The setting is a world where the djinn live in another realm but are known to appear in our own, with their appearance being common enough for the narrator of the story to not be hugely surprised when he finds her ring.

My hope with parts two and three would be to expand this world further, showing more about the realm that the djinn come from and the impact their power has on humans and on our world.

But for now, please take some time and read Dembe’s story. I hope you enjoy it and, as always, comments and feedback about the story are always welcome.

My Writing

When I was younger, I always had a belief in my mind that I would one day make some kind of living from writing. I chose psychology as a subject when I went to uni because I felt that a better understanding of how the mind works would make me a better writer. But although I’ve continued to write to various degrees over the last decade or so, making a living out of my writing has felt less and less easy to do. Partly due to building a career in the NHS, partly due to becoming reliant on that steady wage for myself and my family, partly due to being too busy to make time for it and partly just due to the difficulty in knowing how to even begin.

I sometimes wonder if I should have made more attempts to share my writing – submitting work online or entering competitions or just posting on forums – but building online networks never really came naturally to me and I just found myself thinking that instead of doing that I could be writing something else (or drawing, since that was also something I liked to make time for!). So I kept working on things and having ideas but only a handful of people ever got to read them and then they got put to the side for something else.

I can’t say that my ideas or writing are good enough for people to want to read them. But there are some ideas that I keep going back to. The Link Saga, which I’m starting to post about on this website, has been in my head since I was a teenager. I drafted my first novel in that world when I was still in school (definitely not sharing that now!) and my mind has kept going back to it over the years, thinking about different characters and places and events, some of which have never gotten any further than playing out inside my mind.

For those who are interested, the Link Saga is a modern fantasy world and the ideas that I have for it are largely in the Young Adult category. The story that I’m working on – George Square – is a prequel of sorts to some of my bigger ideas in that world but hopefully reads well on its own too. I can’t promise that I will always be the best at providing updates but I’m currently on maternity leave, so hopeful to have some predictable down time during naps, and also hoping that sharing chapters on here motivates me to keep going too!

I have no idea if anyone will like what I’m writing, or even if it will reach many people (as I said, I’m not very good with the whole online networking thing), but I guess that’s what this website has been set up to test out. Please do take the time to read my work and leave any comments or feedback that you would like. Also open to feedback about the website as I’m still very much getting to know WordPress and how it all works!

Hello all!

So for years I have worked on writing stories in my spare time, just getting ideas out of my head and onto paper (I used to literally fill A4 notepads though it’s now Word documents on my laptop/phone). I finished a novel in the past and got in touch with a few agents in an attempt to move towards having it published, but then I was busy with a new job, getting married, having kids…and it all just fell by the wayside.

I realised that time was ticking on and I wanted to share my work with people, whether it made me money or not, led to publication or not. So this website is me starting to do that – the site is still very much a work in progress but my hope is to use it to share older finished work but also to post a longer novel that I’m working on at the moment (with the hope that sharing will keep me on track for finishing it!)

I’m happy to read any comments/feedback and hope that you enjoy reading some of my work! 😃