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Becoming Jinn Blog Tour: Giveaways and List of 10 Things Every Jinn Girl Needs

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Author Lori Goldstein joins SciFiChick.com today to give us the Top Ten Things Every Jinn Girl Needs and offer a special giveaway (details below)! em>Becoming Jinn releases April 21st from Feiwel & Friends.

Ten Things Every Jinn Girl Needs
by Lori Goldstein

1. Sweets. All Jinn have a sweet tooth, but not every Jinn is talented enough to conjure food. Kitchens need to be stocked with chocolate, ice cream, and a host of sugary treats.

2. A space heater. Jinn love the heat and hate the cold. Space heaters, fireplaces, outdoor firepits, and the like are a requirement.

3. Family cantamen. Part rulebook, part spell book, part history book, part memoir, part diary, a Jinn cantamen helps guide new Jinn as they hone their magic. Each family maintains its own, adding to it over the centuries.

4. A large house. With a Zar sisterhood made up of six Jinn, Zar gatherings require a home with enough room to accommodate big groups. Two Zars together equal twelve Jinn, three pump it up to eighteen…you get the idea.

5. A laptop and an Internet connection. Granting wishes for humans requires research on the wish candidate to ensure whatever actions taken to accomplish the wish won’t raise any suspicions. The more a Jinn knows about their wishee, the less risky granting wishes is…something Azra must learn the hard way.

6. A tagine. To make dishes like Azra’s favorite, chicken tagine with tomatoes and sweet caramelized onions, a traditional tagine with its round dish and conical lid is required.

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The Water and the Wild Blog Tour: Guest Post and Giveaway

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Spaceship in My Basement: How My Trekkie Dad Inspired My Writing
by K.E. Ormsbee

K. E. OrmsbeeThere is a spaceship in the basement of my childhood home. My dad, a civil engineer and hardcore scifi nerd, built the aforementioned ship when I was a toddler. It’s a glorious amalgamation of 2x4s, dental chairs, slide projectors, and dozens of lite-brite pieces. From the pilot’s seat, you can click through various lunar phases, watch the IMAX classic The Dream Is Alive, and command the ship using an MS-DOS shuttle launch program. In this ship, you can pay a visit to the moon, Jupiter, or the farthest reaches of deep space. And believe me, as a kid, I did all of the above.

I can’t remember a house party at my place that didn’t involve a quick trip to the moon. The spaceship was a magical experience, a talking piece, and the obsession of every childhood friend my sister and I brought home. Later, it became my go-to fun fact so often required by summer camp icebreakers. It’s saved me from many a conversational rut and even found its way into my official author biography. But only recently have I begun to contemplate the long-term effect that spaceship and my dad’s general love of scifi had on me and, by extension, my writing.

My personality is a carbon copy of my dad’s. I inherited his melancholic disposition and his obsession with all things theoretical. Growing up, he and I debated everything from Plato to predestination to the legalization of pot. He taught me the fundamentals of calculus, logic, and rhetoric. And he instilled in me an abiding love for Star Wars, Star Trek, Lost In Space, Battlestar Galactica, and The Twilight Zone. Looking back, I realize that those philosophical debates, differential equation lessons, and Friday night family movie dates all shared a common theme. They were all about asking big questions and looking for answers. (It’s just, the questions The Twilight Zone asked were way more fun to answer than the questions found in my Calc 101 textbook.)

My dad and I didn’t watch all those scifi shows and films for the special effects. (I mean, have you seen tribbles?) We watched them because their screenwriters weren’t afraid to explore difficult issues in unique ways. I remember staying awake in bed after our movie nights, brain whirring through questions about mortality, mob mentality, eugenics, treatment of “lesser” sentient beings, addictive behavior, vigilante justice, justice versus revenge, and harmful measures taken in the name of “the greater good.”

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