Cute bookends how to#

The conflict stems from religious and cultural anxieties about cloning, and a perception that clones are not fully fledged people or are a lesser type of person.

You watch a movie, and some grizzled scientists says, ‘This is what happens when you try to play god!’ Cloning is always framed as a disaster, and I wanted to write a story where cloning was part of the plot, but it’s not some inherently wrong thing.

As a SF consumer, it’s always been a pet peeve of mine that cloning is always framed as this dangerous and deviant thing. I wanted to tell a cloning story that wasn’t the typical cloning narrative. “For The Sentient I started off with almost a contrarian mindset. Then, after my book deal, I had a story published in F&SF that I’m really proud of, ‘Bahrain Underground Bazaar’. I had a couple in smaller ‘zines, and then a short story published in Abyss & Apex. “I had one or two short stories published before the book came out. Then I got rejected for a book deal, and then finally got one. I went through the usual process of finding an agent and getting rejected a million times, and then finding the right agent, Naomi Davis – they work for Bookends Literary Agency. Like a lot of writers, my first draft was complete garbage, and then I worked and cut away and edited until it became not garbage. I went to writers’ workshops, I went to conferences, and I learned all the craft that I didn’t know. I just got into writing, and along the way, I got smarter about it. I started off as a rookie not really knowing what I was doing. “I started working on a novel in the evenings, and that ended up being The Sentient, my debut. But I’ve always enjoyed SF, and I realized that’s the true thing I wanted to dig my teeth into and write. It wasn’t the only thing I enjoyed – I was a big literary geek when I was in high school, and I read a lot of classics, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. I said, ‘I am going to write that SF novel that I have always wanted to write.’ I’ve been a science fiction fan for a long time. I got out of a rut, into a new experience and a new start on life. Life shifted when I took a different job and moved to Denver CO. I wanted to write, but I never found the time to actually make it happen, beyond writing the occasional short story.

I got into working for the government after I got my graduate degree, and the writing thing fell by the wayside during those years.

Cute bookends how to#

“I moved back to the States for college and got a journalism degree because I figured, ‘Well, I’m a good writer, therefore I’ll be a good journalist.’ Surprise, surprise, there’s a little more to being a journalist than knowing how to put a sentence together and write pretty descriptions, so I discovered it wasn’t for me. I was born here in the States, but when we were young we moved back to the Middle East and I lived in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which was definitely a unique experience growing up: being part ex-pat, part local, and coming back to visit family a lot in the States. “People ask me where I’m from, and the answer is always long-winded and complicated – but: I’ve got an American mom and a Palestinian dad who is a Saudi national. My family used to say, ‘What are you doing? Why are you walking and humming to yourself around the house?’ That was my early storytelling. I liked taking long walks by myself, even just pacing around my room in a circle and creating my own characters and creating my own stories. “I’ve always been a big reader, and I wanted to be a writer early in childhood. A final volume in the trilogy is forthcoming. Her debut SF novel The Sentient appeared in 2020, with sequel The Emergent published in May 2022. She now works as a program management officer for the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.Īfter publishing a couple of stories in ‘zines, she began producing work of genre interest with “Exhibit K” (2019) in Abyss & Apex, and has since published stories “The Bahrain Underground Bazaar” (2020) in F&SF and “A Thousand Tiny Gods” (2021) in Clarkesworld. Nadia Afifi was born in the US, but grew up in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain before returning to the States for college, where she studied journalism and business.