So I was about to assign it to the abyss of my hard drive, where many of its kin even now lay in slumber. And there was just no way it could be cut down and remain coherent. And your story had better be damned good to deserve that much print: online or otherwise. Most short story markets at the time didn’t take stories past 6 or 7k.

What was supposed to be a short had pushed into novelette territory. When I first wrote that story, I had no idea it would even be published. Unraveling the mystery leads her through the city’s underbelly as she encounters rampaging ghouls, saucy assassins, clockwork angels, and a plot that could unravel time itself. But things aren’t precisely as they seem. In the story, an agent with the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, Fatma el-Sha’arawi, is put on the case of a djinn suicide. So much so that it launched my current writing with Tor.com Publishing, including the unrelated novellas The Black God’s Drums and Ring Shout.Ī Dead Djinn in Cairo was set in an alternate 1912 Cairo, where djinn and magic had returned to to world.

To my surprise, delight, and gratitude, that story did well. If you’ve followed this blog, or my writing, you’ll know my first “big” story was a novelette published on May18 2016 called, A Dead Djinn in Cairo. *Note, this is mostly a re-post of a blog I did earlier this year with some updates. Though I’ve done this before, since it has (again) been a minute, this post is gonna recount the road that brought me here.

My full-length novel, A Master of Djinn, was officially released a week ago from today on by Tor.com Publishing. But thought I’d make time to stop by and say… I WROTE A BOOK!

A master of djinn by p djèlí clark