Hadeer Elsbai's Blog

first i would like to inform you all of three things regarding my upcoming horror novella, you just have to ask me:

you can now add it on goodreads

it is available for preorder wherever books are sold

it has official jacket copy so you can learn more about it!

i’m trying to get back into the headspace of book promotion and being a little more intentional about it. head over to my instagram to see the first page of the novella!

i cannot emphasize enough how excited i am for this book to get to readers...

You may or may not know this about me, but I am a librarian by trade! I have been wanting to use my librarian brain write this post for a long time, and it seems more apt than ever in the age of Gen AI. Every time I see someone use ChatGPT for research I feel it in my solar plexus, and not in a good way.

I’m going to mostly be focusing on easily accessible and searchable open-access (free) resources that lean towards humanities and social sciences. There’s a variety of open-access search engines ...

[major spoilers throughout]

i went into the third season of interview with the vampire with optimism and excitement, partly because of the goodwill engendered by the first two seasons (which, though certainly not flawless, i loved), but also because i was reading the book alongside watching the show, and i have a very strong tendency to always compare adaptations to their original material, and to prefer the latter (yes, i am a recovering book purist). so i started watching the show determined no...

i began the month by embarking on a short trip with two friends. first, we went to their alma mater in ithaca, and i was delighted to be shown the town and college where they had spent four long years. cornell is a vast, vast campus, the sort of campus that feels like it’s eating up the town in which it is located, or rather, the campus that begins to itself feel more like its own town. when i was in high school and touring college campuses, i was partial to ones that felt compact and enclosed (...

i am Tired and dreading the onset of summer as i do every year and so will jump right into the content consumed (which isn’t much idk why much of may i felt so listless but also i was doing some significant edits to a project currently on sub so there’s that)

this was a very cute and very wild shoujo about a girl who ends up working as a housekeeper an idol she’s obsessed with, who turns out to have a very different personality than the one he shows to the world. i liked that...

first, an announcement:

i am publishing a contemporary horror novella titled YOU JUST HAVE TO ASK ME next year with union square & co! this is my first novella, my first horror, and a book i wrote when i was in a writing slump after writing my sequel and truly unsure if i still knew how to write a book. my best friend suggested i take a short break from fantasy and do something shorter and less intimidating, just to prove to myself that i could, in fact, string words together into a cohesive nar...

first, an announcement:

i am publishing a contemporary horror novella titled YOU JUST HAVE TO ASK ME next year with union square & co! this is my first novella, my first horror, and a book i wrote when i was in a writing slump after writing my sequel and truly unsure if i still knew how to write a book. my best friend suggested i take a short break from fantasy and do something shorter and less intimidating, just to prove to myself that i could, in fact, string words together into a cohesive nar...

late last month, my mom let my brother and i know that we were needed in cairo to take care of a few bureaucratic/legal things, and so we used it as an opportunity to spend some much-needed time with our family members, all of whom reside in egypt and who we haven’t seen in some time (4 years for me, 7 years for my brother). we had planned to take some sort of beach-related trip, or at least do a few touristy things, but mostly we ended up hanging out at malls (if there’s one thing egypt has a p...

i know this is a cliche, but it truly feels like february went by in the blink of an eye for me. then again, this feeling is likely only because i tend to measure my months in terms of content consumed, and i did not consume very much content this month, even though i ostensibly had a lot of free time, or at least i thought i did. i certainly don’t recall what i did that would have taken up all my time.

on the bright side: i will have some book-related news to share later this year, which is ver...

1. “emma woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.”

— emma by jane austen

2. “cambridge, michaelmas term, october. the wind bit, the sun hid, and on the first day of class, when she ought to have been lecturing undergraduates about the dangers of using the cartesian severance spell to revise without pee bre...