Companions of the Garden

“Companions of the Garden,” my as-yet unpublished novel, chronicles the friendship of two wayfaring New Yorkers on a road trip to New Orleans - a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man, both young, both American, and both hungry to challenge the social norms in which both feel constrained. Through this blog, I hope not only to generate interest in the book itself, but also the issues it seeks to address: those of gender, religion, and national identity, and the role of the spirit in an age of flux.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

N. Jerin Arifa's post on One Billion Rising

Congratulations to my ever-inspiring wife, whose excellent post on the pervasiveness of Islamophobia and its intersection with women's rights issues had the prestigious honor of being featured on Eve Ensler's One Billion Rising.
I'll allow the post to speak for itself.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

First deadline met!

I'm happy to announce that I met my first deadline - three days ahead of schedule!

The first draft of the chapter-by-chapter outline is now complete. I'll spend a week or two revising it, and then it's time to knuckle down in earnest - re-writing the text itself.

To that end, the chapter summary was one of the most useful exercises I've ever pursued, partly in that it forced me to make sense of a story that was often nebulous even for its author. The chief challenge going forward, as I alluded to earlier, is to avoid overcompensating into didacticism, something I loathe as a reader.

Lucky thing, then, that challenges are precisely what I need!