Hadeer Elsbai's Blog

you may or may not know this, but: the daughters of izdihar was my first book. not my first published book, but the first book i had ever written. or perhaps i should say it was the first book i ever finished, because i had of course written plenty of half-books and quarter-books before that one. it was also the first book i queried, and the first book i published. i got lucky in a lot of ways, considering i had no idea what i was doing. certainly, i like to think that i had some natural, elemen...

september! the start of my favorite time of year, autumn! while i am still exhausted all the time, my malaise has eased, and i’ve actually been writing fairly consistently. i will never be a write-every-day sort of writer, but i’ve managed to write probably 20 out of the 30 days of september, culminating in about 15k words. not a lot if i want to get a draft of this project finished by the end of the year, but generally far better than my usual output. i’ve gotten into a good rhythm with it wher...

i’ve got a very short one for you this month, because i am very tired! i’ve been battling intense brain fog all of august, and i’ve had brain fog for a while, but this month it feels like it’s really really ramped up. which means i haven’t really done or consumed much, and i’ve been dnf-ing a bunch of books, and not even really watching much, and generally just getting through things with the speed of molasses on a cold winter day. i hope this is just my usual summer sluggishness/reverse SAD and...

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...