Every ending is a new beginning: wrapping up The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings

Iqra Asad Khan Writing about writing , , , , , , , , ,

I am in the process of writing the last episode for The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings. It has been a great journey writing this series. While Hackschool Project, my first novel serialized in Us Magazine, The News International, was hugely popular for its coverage of the educational issues of Pakistani youth, The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings got a lot of attention for the issues it covered. Every time I highlighted an issue related to arranged marriages in Pakistan in The Eid Engagement, readers would write in to Us Magazine to share their experiences. I was always amazed how, no matter what I wrote, someone would write in to say that the same thing happened to them. It just goes to show that the issues related to arranged marriages in Pakistan are universal and can be appreciated by all readers.

According to the feedback I received, readers thought Hackschool Project dealt with a more groundbreaking topic than arranged marriage, which is a good assessment when Pakistani media covers arranged marriages from every angle. Still, I felt like I needed to add my viewpoint on this topic. While in Hackschool Project I covered a collection of various issues related to student life, in The Eid Engagement I dealt mainly with one topic: the right of a girl to choose the man she marries. I did not feel the need to cover multiple aspects of arranged marriage in one novel. Certainly, I can always address another aspect of arranged marriages in Pakistan in another novel related to this issue. For now, I am content that I followed Hina on her journey of deciding whether or not to marry Sameer. It was important to me to stress that a girl needs to be satisfied with her decision to marry someone before the families proceed with the marriage ceremony. Far too often, a girl’s view on her own marriage is brushed under the rug, pushed out of the way to make room for other things like what her parents want and what society demands from a young woman. Not every case of arranged marriage where the girl feels undecided about the match ends happily, and as I showed with the character of Sameer, the girl’s indecision about her own marriage can cause trouble after the couple starts their married life together.

It is a simple expectation, really. Let a girl decide if she wants to marry the man her parents choose for her. She is the one who is going to spend the rest of her life with the man she marries. The marriage formula “put a man and a woman together and the woman will make the marriage work no matter what the man does” is no longer relevant in the 21st century. Parents need to adjust their expectations from their daughters and accommodate their wishes about the most important decision of their lives.

I hope my readership enjoys the last episode of The Eid Engagement. I have the next novel lined up to start writing soon, but that is the topic of another blog post.

The Iqra Writes Update # 1

Iqra Asad Khan The Iqra Writes Update , , , , , ,

Welcome to the Iqra Writes update where you can catch me in my natural habitat, that is, talking about writing and everything else that I’ve been up to. It’s finally fall season and that makes another season I’ve been working on The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings. The thing about this story is that it grows with every turn in the plot. I recently plotted the latest turn so now the story is all set to go down that path and show us what happens to the characters as they struggle with the pre-marital phase and everything involved in it. It took awhile for me to find the critical element that would tie the story together in the middle. I had started the story a long time ago with the intent that it would show conflict between the main character and her two friends. When the story changed to reflect points of disagreement between the main character and her mother, I had to look for the connecting element that would carry the story forward beyond its beginning stages. Thankfully, I found it. What is this element, you ask? I found a question that would take the rest of the book to find an answer. Questions are a good way to connect the plot to the theme of the story. When I want to explore the chosen theme of the story, coming up with some questions to answer is a good way to do that.

Hackschool Project Audiobook

In other news, I have a surprise for readers of Hackschool Project, my first novel. I am working on the audiobook version of the novel. It is a slow start as I learn the ins and outs of the process and develop my rhythm. I hope to record the entirety of the novel in due time and bring the audiobook out as soon as possible.

Book recommendation

It’s time for a book recommendation. The book is The Joy Diet by Martha Beck. I read this as part of the Book Hero book club by DiscoverU. It is a practical book full of easily applicable wisdom for how to live your life. It is simple to understand and well written. I highly recommend it. The diet recommended in this book is a diet of action steps to take to improve your own quality of life and achieve joy. It does not relate to any actual food consumption tips.

What I am playing

I can’t give an update about what I’m up to without talking about what games I’m playing. I got back into playing Animal Crossing New Horizons recently. It’s a cute game about living on an island and building and decorating it as you please. A new update is coming out for the game which includes new features like a coffee shop and an island resort that you can decorate for visitors. I’m so excited to try out these new features and have fun with this game all over again. I also started playing New Pokemon Snap. It’s another cute game but this time it’s about taking pictures of Pokemon in the wild to use for Pokemon research. I’m glad I got it, even though it’s pretty simple but it’s nice to play a game that doesn’t have a lot of demands for once. You just see a Pokemon and wait for it to make a fun pose that you can take a picture of. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

Recommendation for writers

 If you’re looking for writing advice, I want to point you in the direction of Lauren Sapala. She is a writer who blogs and teaches courses about how intuitive personalities can use their imaginative personality traits to write better. I want to point you in the direction of her blog laurensapala.com where you can find her blog posts containing advice to writers on any topic about writing that you can think of. It’s worth it to read her blog and if you want to go further you can get her book The INFJ Writer or take her Intuitive Writing course. INFJ is a personality type according to Myers Briggs personality types and in her book Lauren talks about the common challenges and solutions for writers who have this personality type. If you don’t know what your personality type is, you can find out by taking the quiz at 16personalities.com and if you’re an INFP or INFJ who likes to write, I highly recommend getting her book.

I will close out this update with the reminder that you can find my first novel, Hackschool Project at meraqissa.com/book/1668 and whenever I am done with The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings you will find it there too. This is Iqra, signing out.

Listen to this episode as a podcast on:

Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/iqra-writes-update-1/id1591131524?i=1000539116728

SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/iqrawrites/iqra-writes-update-1?si=9ef59614ae6246e485944487de7d4f3f

Shifting Gears from Hackschool Project to The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings

Iqra Asad Khan Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

When I finished writing Hackschool Project, I knew the story of the three Moin siblings remained yet to be told. I could see clearly them continuing along the lines where I had left them. With Leena in college, Inaya just having finished her O Levels and Jasir starting Matric, I see many tales of their educational years yet before us. I decided, however, to put the Hackschool Project sequel on hold to make way for a new story to come through. An older story with more mature characters and a different theme from Hackschool Project, exploring the world of young people once they are past their educational years. I decided to explore the topic of choosing someone to marry through the eyes of three friends, two who are already engaged when the story starts, and the main character, Hina, whose process of getting married is the focus of the story. Hina’s experiences of getting engaged and everything that comes with an engagement unfold in a backdrop of commentary from her friends, who have opinions about every step of the process and do not hesitate to share them.

The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings flows differently from Hackschool Project in terms of how story points connect to each other. The story builds over time as events progress and one thing leads to another. Wedding-level excitement cannot be present in the beginning chapters of the story, where the engagement is still in the planning stages. In this way, The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings builds from stage to stage: the pre-engagement stage, the engagement ceremony stage, the immediate post-engagement stage, and so on. At every stage, we see the friends’ commentary of it. The friends’ commentary is a recurring occurrence and its regularity in the story is the bar by which each stage is measured. Is it acceptable? Is it fashionable? Is it current? Hina’s friends run her ongoing engagement experiences past their personal standards. Their most strict standard is comparing Hina’s experiences to their own engagements. Hina’s engagement might fail one friend’s standards of being fashionable, or the other friend’s standards of being authentic, but in the end what comes to light is Hina’s development of her own standard. As Hina determines what she wants, she runs her engagement past her friends’ standards and finds it severely lacking. This, combined with her own wishes to get more out of the situation, ultimately leads her to prioritize what is important to herself first. Will she remain bound to her friends’ standards? Will she find what she is looking for in her engagement? Will she fall in love with her fiance? We will find this out together, as I am still writing The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings at the time of writing this post. If you’re interested in my published work, you may get Hackschool Project, my story about students using the power of family, fun and friendship to survive school life, here at the Mera Qissa bookstore.

My Firstborn Novel, Hackschool Project

Iqra Asad Khan Uncategorized , ,

Write what you know. It is the saying that guides all those who explore the world of writing fiction in novel form. For me, this was an easy choice. I wanted to write about student life before I got too far ahead in life to remember it as clearly and dearly as I do now. The part most dear to me about student life were the little things we did for each other as friends and family members to help us get through this time of our lives, which seemed to stretch on and on. Then I wanted to write about these moments as well as those features of student life in Pakistan that students challenge and that students celebrate. A challenge moment might be exams, and a celebratory moment might be end of exams, tearing up the exam schedule that was done and in the past. I drew on my experiences and observations of student life to write up ice cream parties as well as the doom and gloom that accompanies bad results.

The result was my novel, Hackschool Project. I am proud of it and the subject matter I chose to write about. When it comes to young life and student life, anything you write about is someone’s story. I wrote this story for 3 years in Us Magazine, The News International. Then I compiled it into novel form. In a way it is a story that has stayed with me and been my companion for years, the characters often thought of in between everything I was doing in my own life at the time.

Here it is. My beauty of an ink baby. I say it’s a wonder it even came to be, and for every novel it is so. It was published on the 21st of January, 2021.

You can get it here: https://www.meraqissa.com/book/1668

Dark Room

Iqra Asad Khan Magazine Articles, Us Magazine

“How do you play this game again?”

“You type.”

“There’s a keyboard and a screen. I get it. But what do I type?”

“Anything.”

“This would be so much simpler with a game controller, even a gaming mouse.”

“That kind of defeats the whole set-up. ‘Interactive fiction’—a story you engage with.”

“It sounds cool but when it comes down to looking at that blinking cursor and the two lines of introductory text, it’s…discouraging.”

“Since when were you someone to be discouraged by words?”

“I have no idea what words have been programmed into this game.”

“That’s the whole point. Play. Discover. Win!”

“Really? There’s such a thing as winning in this game? I thought we just had to complete it.”

“Enough talking. More typing.”

“But—”

“Type!”

“Alright, alright…”

A finger raised above the keyboard. Hovering above one letter, then the other. Finally descending upon one key.

[enter]

You are in a dark room. The words appear underneath the introductory text.

“Now what?”

“Try another key.”

This time the finger selects the key instantly.

[spacebar]

Your head hits the ceiling.

“Oops.”

[spacebar]

Your head hits the ceiling.

“Is that all?”

[spacebar]

Do you want to knock yourself out?

“Yes! Go unconscious, finish this game.”

“It can’t hear you.”

“It should be able to. Voice recognition. I should be able to talk and walk my way through this game.”

“Yeah, then it wouldn’t be a ‘text’-based game, then, would it?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Enough sarcasm. More typing.”

“Alright.”

[up arrow]

The ceiling is hard.

“I know that, smartypants game.”

[down arrow]

Watch where you’re going!

[left arrow] [right arrow] [up arrow]

“What are you pressing the arrow keys for?”

“I’m moving my player!”

“You have no idea what to do!”

“Well then, give me a hint!”

“You need to see.”

“Very funny.”

“No, you need to light up the room so it’s no longer dark. The game won’t respond otherwise.”

“And how am I going to do that?”

“That’s the whole point!”

“That’s it.” Chair pushed backwards, away from the computer table. “I could write a better game then this.”

“OK, then. Go ahead. Write the game and I’ll play it!”

“Fine.”

********

“So, when do I get to play your game?”

“It’s finished.”

“Let me play it, then.”

“Here you go.”

[enter]

No response.

“Going straight for the enter key. Nice move.”

“Be quiet. Let me see.”

[spacebar]

No response.

[arrow keys]

Which way do you want to go?

“That’s it?”

“That’s how I code! Do you want to play or not?”

“OK. I want to go straight.”

“Er—perhaps you are mistaking me for voice recognition software?”

“Oh, let me play.”

[up arrow]

You can’t go up.

[down arrow]

You have nothing to dig with.

[right arrow]

You take a step to the right.

[right arrow]

You are out of moves.

[right arrow]

You can’t move.

“What are you up to with this game? You should have told me there were a limited number of moves.”

“And you should have told me some of the basics of the first game.”

“OK. I was being smart with you. You’re so good at games, I wanted to frustrate you. But only because you beat me every time.”

“It’s not always about winning.”

“Yeah, sometimes it’s about making a point.”

“Point taken.”

“Friends?”

“Friends.”

A pause.

“Now let’s go code that assignment for class. We’re on the same team, after all.”

***

This was originally published in Us Magazine for the youth, The News International, on June 1, 2018: https://www.thenews.com.pk/magazine/us/323839-dark-room

Book Tales: Living the American book lover’s dream

Iqra Asad Khan Book Tales, Diary Entries

I finally returned to reading this year. As someone who is known as a reader, it is strange for me to say this, but there was a long stretch of time when I didn’t pick up a book. Before that, I tried a few books, but it has been a while since books were a proper part of my daily routine. Now, thanks to Austin Public Library, I have access to more titles than I can possibly read.

It took me some switching around of ebooks, swapping them back and forth in the online library catalog before I finally settled on books that interested me enough to finish reading them. Once I had stopped returning my library ebooks unfinished, I progressed to checking out physical copies of the books I wanted to read. That was when the real fun began. I started reading books regularly before going to sleep. It was the best time of day for me to pull out a library hardcover and get lost in the pages. I reserved the contemporary books for bedtime reading and the fantasy books for daytime reading, mainly because I didn’t want fantasy creatures chasing me around in my dreams.

I used to suffer from emotional hangups where I judged myself for reading girly books and fantasy, but then I got over it. I was no longer an impressionable teen, after all. I wasn’t even a young adult anymore, as my brother pointed out on my birthday. I was a proper adult, and that meant I was going to read young adult books without guilt. (Do you see the irony?) Back in my teens and early twenties, I used to filter books in the quest to find ones that were squeaky clean. Now I know from experience to avoid books in which the author’s name is printed larger than the title of the book itself. As for the rest of it, I read through the lovey-dovey scenes and get on with the story without pausing to judge myself. It’s the violent and gory scenes that I try to filter out beforehand now.

Visiting the library is one of the highlights of the week. I got two book totes to carry the books back and forth. (They aren’t new. I just unearthed an old one I had from before and convinced my father to give me a sturdier one which was in his possession.)  I like putting books on hold beforehand and just sweeping in to collect them. Sometimes I wander through the young adult section to see if anything catches my eye and add it to the pile before checking out.

As for my TBR, don’t even ask. The list of books I want to read keeps growing and I keep falling behind. There are series that have been on my radar over the years, standalone books and series I hear about on Booktube, and random books that grab my attention while browsing the shelves.

I still buy books from Amazon. They are mostly non-fiction titles that I want to keep and refer to over the years. The bulk of my fiction reading comes from the library. As a book lover, I am in book heaven. There are a few books I want to read that the library doesn’t have, but there are so many that they do have that I am well occupied for now.

2017 was slow to start, reading-wise, but I have a good foundation for 2018 to be a great reading year. Most of my TBR will spill over to 2018 and once I’m done reading those books, the list will have expanded. That way, I hope to be happily engaged in book reading throughout the year.

When I look back at my reading goals (even as I previously described them on this blog), I think I held myself back by limiting myself to very serious non-fiction. Allowing myself to enjoy fiction is one of the best decisions I ever made. It’s like having a part of my childhood back. The wonder of reading and the thrill of discovering a story, but without homework and school projects lurking in the background. There was a phase when I wanted to revisit my childhood favorites, but now I want to explore young adult and contemporary fiction. I even read a book from the adult age category without knowing it. I only discovered afterward that it wasn’t YA, though I had a sneaking suspicion while reading because the main characters went into their thirties by the time the story wound up. It’s not that I don’t read adult books in general. It’s just that I used to find them a bit dull. I suppose a few years makes a lot of difference in perspective as a reader. This side of twenty holds a lot less patience about stories dealing with teen angst and a lot more openness towards main characters who have to pay rent.

As for which book tricked me into thinking it was YA, that’s a story for another time. Right now, I have to get back to reading the book on my bedside table.

 

Book Tales: A Pakistani book lover’s experience with libraries

Iqra Asad Khan Book Tales, Diary Entries , , , , , ,

Back in Pakistan, my experience with libraries was limited to my school library, then my college library. I had a lot of fun with my school library. I borrowed new books from the library every week. In this way, I got my hands on series like Sabrina the Teenage Witch and The Baby-Sitters Club. I read these series primarily from my school library, as the books my parents got me at that stage were mostly Enid Blyton books and classics. I also had the experience of picking up To Kill a Mockingbird many times from the shelf, reading and stumbling through the opening paragraphs, and putting it back on the shelf, until the day came when I pushed past the beginning and got into the main flow of the story, which was much more readable. I might not have given the book these many chances if I had not walked past it so many times at school.

I discovered some children’s authors through the school library that I didn’t encounter during my trips to the bookstore. Tanith Lee’s “The Castle of Dark” drew me in with its immersive storytelling, Jacqueline Wilson’s “The Lottie Project” and “Double Act” took me on fun-filled journeys, and Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth” enchanted me by reminding me of Alice in Wonderland. There were books I still remember fondly, quick reads I’ve forgotten and long reads that were forgettable, books I recommended to all my friends to read, and books I told them to ignore in favor of better reads. I still remember picking up “How to write really badly” by Anne Fine, loving it and popularizing it among my friends. One of them went on to mention the book in her autograph to me at the end of school. In short, the school library was a world of wonder for me.

Not so the college library. While the Pakistani system of having “intermediate” education places you beyond school but before undergraduate studies, choosing the pre-medical major also places you firmly in the science bracket. This meant that I couldn’t borrow art books from the library, something that came as an unpleasant discovery when I took an art book to the library desk. While I realize now that this was just the librarian making a poor excuse to protect her expensive art book from being checked out from the library (what good it would be for it to spend its life collecting dust on the shelf, nobody knows), at the time I didn’t challenge it. I cried angry tears and moved on. Needless to say, I didn’t have anywhere near a fulfilling experience with that library as I did with my school one.

My undergraduate college library held textbooks and only textbooks. No novels, leisure reading or anything of the sort. I only visited it to get access to reference books, most of which could only be read in the library itself. My library-less years extended from college life to a few years beyond it. When I moved to America, land of the public libraries, my reading life was on the brink of a great change. Little did I know this, until one day someone told me a captivating nugget of information that transformed my reading life: you could borrow ebooks through an app by using your library card. The full story is chronicled in the next Book Tales. Until then, happy reading, and wherever you are, I hope you have access to a library of books, whether public or your own.

Revisiting childhood: surfing high on a wave of nostalgia

Iqra Asad Khan Diary Entries , , , , , ,

I am going through a nostalgic phase nowadays. That means that I am digging up books I used to read as a child, spending time reconnecting to those childhood experiences that seem almost magical when viewed across the expanse of the intervening years. The good thing is that these old things are as enjoyable as they were back when I was a child, if not more. The bad part is that it puts me even further from getting into contemporary stuff, but there’s no rush to do that, so I can take my time on the nostalgia train and get to contemporary station eventually.

I read a lot of children’s classics back in the day, so revisiting my childhood reads means rereading The Secret Garden, Heidi, Anne of Green Gables, A Little Princess and The Jungle Book. Most of these I got as ebooks, with the exception of The Jungle Book, which I got as a hardcover at the beginning of my nostalgic journey. With my recent discovery of classics being available as free audiobooks, I went and downloaded a bunch of them and started listening to A Little Princess. I have reached the most heartbreaking part of the book, which is somehow even more heartbreaking in audio form, with the reader voicing the characters’ emotions with a different voice for each one. Having these books in audio form means that I experience them differently enough for them to feel new but the story is still familiar, so it still counts as a nostalgic trip.

Another story that thrilled me as a child was The Lord of the Rings. I have reread the Harry Potter series more frequently than The Lord of the Rings, which is why I can safely put off rereading Harry Potter and focus on getting my hands on a copy of The Lord of the Rings. I have still to decide whether to get a hard copy, an ebook or an audiobook. I am so used to reading the tiny, tiny text of my old and worn paperback copy of The Lord of the Rings that any other format is going to change the experience considerably.

I am not going to go so far as to dive into the Enid Blyton books again. For one thing, there are so many that it would take me a lot of time to revisit them all. Yes, I did read a lot of her books as a child. Even typing this tempts me to see how I can get my hands on the Twins at St Clare’s series again. It would also prompt my mother to hypothetically throw me out of the house for going back to Enid Blyton at this age. I could probably get away with listening to them in audiobook form. You can tell I am totally going to go in that direction. As long as I’m going down memory lane, why not go all the way? Let me just stop short of digging up Dr. Seuss books. I actually reread them before giving them to my little cousins to read, so in a way, I have already revisited them as well as my “Peter and Jane” picture books.

As an avid reader, I have a rich history of books I have read. As a rereader, potentially all those books are up for revisiting. I will come around to reading contemporary books and recent releases, but for now, let me try to catch the wonder of a child reader’s joy in the well-loved pages of a familiar story. Once I am done with that, I can start making memories for my future self to return to at a later date. That’s just how nostalgia works, right?

 

 

Preparing to write and actually writing: a comparison

Iqra Asad Khan Diary Entries , , ,

The single most useful piece of writing advice I have gathered from reading books, blog posts and articles on the subject is: use bum glue. To be specific, that means glue yourself to your seat and stay there. You can fiddle about with fancy word processing software, gimmicky grammar tools, and writing websites, but in the end, it’s just you and your willpower.

I don’t mean to say that you can force words out of your brain from sheer force of will. What I mean is that once you sit down and commit to sitting there for a specified period of time, you will eventually put fingers to keyboard (or pen to paper) and get work done. Maybe you need a cup of your caffeinated beverage of choice to activate your mind. Maybe you need an arrangement of cushions and footstools to get comfortable enough for the words to flow. Once your writing environment is in place, all that is left is to stop messing with it and just write.

I spent a long time in this space where I would just read about writing and not actually write. Sure, I picked up on the finer points of putting together a manuscript, but the writing process itself was quite neglected. The fact of the matter is that you learn by doing. You can choose to spend all your life making one piece of art or spend your time making different things and improving along the way.

Most things worth knowing are simple. It is when our natural resistance to making effort comes into play that things get complicated. You can choose either to “keep it simple, stupid” or make life unnecessarily tangled for yourself. It’s your choice.

Finding my way back home

Iqra Asad Khan Diary Entries , , ,

“Home” for me is writing. I have never suffered as much as I do when, for whatever reason, I give it up for a period of time. Whenever I turn back to it, it welcomes me back with open arms. I lose myself in it. It is my personal process of healing. If I don’t write, my unspent creative energy builds up into a big block of worry, and that is unhealthy.

In my autograph diary in which I got autographs from my teachers and schoolmates back in high school, one of my teachers told me to keep a hold onto writing, as she herself regretted letting go of it. Whenever I experience the peaceful bubble I can cocoon myself into when I write after a break from it, I recall this piece of advice from her and doubly appreciate it. I would be a fool to give up writing permanently. It is just hard-wired into my brain.

My brother is my personal cheerleader as far as writing goes. He is responsible for getting me to set up a “writing tracker”, which is basically a notebook in which I chart my writing progress. As usual, I either have several works in progress at one time, or none at all. I suppose it’s “all or nothing” for me.

My latest return to writing has been a happy one. I finally started writing my book, for real this time. I started a serial story for one of the magazines I write for. Both projects are enough to keep me on my toes. I aim to see both projects through to completion. That would be a serious achievement for me as a writer.

So, here goes nothing. I’m all set to continue my writing journey. I’ll keep you posted as to how it goes!