Hadeer Elsbai's Blog

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...

over the years i have stopped doing new year’s resolutions, not because i feel bad about not fulfilling them, but because i usually end up totally forgetting about them, so it feels like wasted effort. i decided not to bother this year, and then, just last week, i realized i did in fact have (1) resolution: to downsize and declutter.

i live in a fairly small house, and i have accumulated a lot of Stuff, and over the years i’ve come to detest visual clutter. i am also running out of space for all...

2025 was the year i fully got back into anime, and i watched twenty-three anime in total. here’s the full list:

dandadan, chainsaw man, demon slayer, jujutsu kaisen, love of kill, naruto, naruto shippuden, neon genesis evangelion, noragami stray god, talentless nana, the apothecary diaries, the case study of vanitas, the summer hikaru died, wind breaker, yona of the dawn, bungo stray dogs, mashle, hunter x hunter, frieren, orb, gachiakuta, blue lock, horimiya

out of these, i’ve chosen my ten favo...

i have nothing to report, really, or even muse upon; december — particularly the second half— always feels like a month of imaginary days, as we flit from one holiday to the next. i always try to just finish things i’ve started, so let’s get into it.

anime (+1 live-action); blue lock (season 1 and 2);

well, this show really snuck up on me. i’d started season 1 last month and was enjoying it, but i didn’t think i’d reach a point where i loved it so much. it’s still a crazy, wild ride, but with fair...

i read 50 books in 2025, and it was overall a fantastic reading year. i attribute that to a few reasons:

my continued willingness to dnf books i’m not vibing with

this year, rather than trying to thin out my shelves by reading books i already own regardless of whether or not i want to or creating random tbrs, i focused solely on mood reading

i read a ton of adult fantasy books, and that has always been my preferred genre

i gave up on reading hyped and popular books that i know are not for me (mainl...

a few months ago, i started a brand new work in progress, an adult high fantasy. i wrote with a fervor i hadn’t experienced since writing the first 10k of the daughters of izdihar in 2017. i wrote with complete abandon, and i had fun, so much fun. i was coming off a lot of anime that had inspired me, and i was writing the story like an anime, with lots of color and banter and humor. i wrote about 20k words with very minimal worldbuilding, but i had a good grasp of my characters as people. the vi...

though nanowrimo no longer officially exists, there are still plenty of people who embark on an unofficial nanowrimo during november and attempt to write 50k words a month. i learned long ago that nanowrimo was not for me, for various reasons, and so i didn’t even try to attempt it this year. i did, however, commit to something like rebecca mix’s gentle nanowrimo, though even that i did not entirely succeed at. basically, i worked on worldbuilding.

worldbuilding is a tricky thing. you don’t want ...