Good morning, dear hearts!
As you know, I have an active interest in seeking out new stories within the realms of ‘Magical Realism’ and specifically the stories of the ‘Jinn’. I sometimes wonder what inspires the writers who seek out this train of thought to explore through their stories – how do they establish the world-building and stretch our imaginations to endeavour to take the journey with them as they build this ‘experience’ outside our regular wanderings and insight into what is plausible just beyond our conceptional understanding of the perimeters of our world?
The Jinn themselves are shrouded in Mythology and Lore – where the memories of who they are and were past and present are fragmented to where this absence of recollection has strengthened their ‘mysterious’ allure by keeping them a bit ‘out of reach’ of the audiences of recent generations – thereby, it’s writers who seek to bring them ‘forward’ into our time-line of curiosity. We start to see new stories emerge out of this new awakening of both insight and thought-provoking thesis’s on who the ‘Jinn are’ and how we can explore their lives from a close perspective wherein we gain more insight into their lives.
My appreciation of the Jinn began when I first read Helene Wecker’s “The Golem and the Jinni” – a novel which ended on an auspiciously curious ‘cliffhanger‘ – a sequel, I long to see published (it’s nearly time!) but it’s the conceptional glimpse of how the Jinn behave, feel and emote themselves into our human dimension – of how muddling things can turn quite mad when a Jinn is present and how complicated a life can become when love intercedes on everything else… the stories themselves offer a further glimpse into our own motivations and of the winding path of how humans and Jinn are continuously placed on each others’ paths.
Today, I am featuring an author who dares to ask another ‘question’ of the Jinn – of how can they purport a life near humans or with humans whilst establishing his ‘world’ through a lens not every reader might be familiar.
Tribal Affairs
Dahlia, a centuries old genie, lies hopelessly trapped in a damaged golden locket charm attached to an ankle bracelet. Its owner, sixteen-year-old Liana, wears it for the first time during her father Jamison’s opening night illusion spectacular. Not only does its presence cause Jamison to folly his performance, but it also starts a chain of bizarre events that lead to a showdown with Dahlia’s mortal enemy, Stefan, and an unsuspecting romance between Liana and his son.
Places to find the book:
on 31st July, 2017
Self Published Author
Formats Available: Paperback and Ebook
Converse via: #MagicalRealism, #YALit or #YAFantasy
To better understand this author’s muse regarding the Jinn and his interest in writing a story about them, I asked a topic of interest for Mr Dallmann:
“What first drew you into the mythology and legacy of the Jinn? Was it a specific story or author’s approach to highlighting the lives of the Jinn which inspired you to write your own story or was it something else? What was your favourite aspect of writing about the Jinn and the love story which unfolds?
Access Granted (an essay) by Matt Dallmann
It is hard these days to find something original to write about. I was recently told that about 3,000 new books are published or self-published every day. I was immediately depressed. How could anything I write possibly penetrate through this sea of books? Luckily, I started writing years before I heard this news, when I was still full of vim, vigor and vodka. Back then, when I was sporting a Y2K doomsday shirt and an analog Nokia cell phone, I, and everyone else apparently, racked my brain to come up with something original, or at least a different take on an old story.
Due to the success of Harry Potter, Star Wars, vampires, etc., etc., I started my search in the world of fantasy. Of course, there are a lot of these stories, but what was it about the Harry Potter’s and the Luke Skywalker’s that made people so willing to follow them? What drew people into their foreign worlds? How did they provide access to something most knew nothing about and/or had no interest in learning? More often that not, when I looked at the similarities in all of these characters, it was the fact that they were all half-in and half-out that made them intriguing. They kept one foot in reality, or the familiar, and let the other take a step into the unknown. We gained access to foreign lands and foreign concepts as they did.
I picked the genie or djinn/jinn mythology mostly because I felt that it was never really welcome in the western mainstream beyond a wacky cartoon or a two-dimensional sitcom character. As I researched the djinn and learned about the different tribes, I started to draw a correlation in my mind to the different regions/countries/tribes of the Middle East. “Humans,” then, became “western civilization,” which is why the essential romantic conflict is between a djinn and one of the original American colonists.
All of this, of course, exists only in my mind as an allegory, and is not spelled out in the book. But my hope is that this story, like the half-human half-genie in it, gives people access to a foreign culture that they might not otherwise even look for. And, like the romance that unfolds in the book, I hope that through that access, people will discover something new and worthy of breaking boundaries.
About Matt Dallmann
Matt Dallmann has a background in acting and holds a BFA from Marymount Manhattan College in New York City. His films and screenplays have been featured at film festivals across the United States including Cinequest, Big Apple Film Festival, Seattle’s True Independent Film Festival, DragonCon and Zero Independent Film Festival. His piano compositions have been published for commercial use and he is a member of ASCAP. Matt is also the Co-Founder and Vice President of the boutique medical billing firm VGA Billing Services, Inc. in New York City. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two daughters.
This author guest post is courtesy of: iRead Book Tours
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Kindly leave your thoughts, comments & questions for Mr Dallmann in the Comments!
Similar to blog tours where I feature book reviews, as I choose to highlight an author via a Guest Post, Q&A, Interview, etc., I do not receive compensation for featuring supplemental content on my blog. I provide the questions for interviews and topics for the guest posts; wherein I receive the responses back from publicists and authors directly. I am naturally curious about the ‘behind-the-scenes’ of stories and the writers who pen them; I have a heap of joy bringing this content to my readers.
{SOURCES: Cover art of “Tribal Affairs”, book synopsis, author biography, author photograph of Matt Dallmann and the iRead badge were all provided by iRead Book Tours and used with permission. Post dividers by Fun Stuff for Your Blog via Pure Imagination. Tweets embedded by codes provided by Twitter. Blog graphics created by Jorie via Canva: Writerly Topics Banner and the Comment Box Banner.}
Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2017.
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Topic about the Jinn: #amwriting
world-building & archttps://t.co/BUzXVrkIdM— SpooktasticallyJorie (@joriestory) October 26, 2017
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