Zeinab Alayan's Blog, page 12

The best thing about days off…

… is snuggling in a warm bed while everybody else in the house wakes up at the crack of dawn getting ready for school and work, especially when it’s pretty cold and rainy outside. It felt like payback for all those hot summer days during which I was the only one getting up for work and walking around under the baking sun, haha.

Oh, if only I had a cat to snuggle with! (Photo Credit: http://www.redbubble.com)

It also gives me the chance to acknowledge and show my appreciation to all the blog lov...

“You’ll have a tale or two to tell when you come back…”

I watched the Hobbit this weekend. To say I loved it would be an understatement. The movie invoked a lot of emotion within me and I reacted with it throughout the 2 hours and 49 minutes. I laughed, I tensed up, I cried, I sat on the edge of my seat, I got goosebumps, I wrinkled my nose in disgust, I oohed and ahhed… I was simply taken with it.

I was also a little bit envious. Among all the books I read, I’ve encountered a number of stories that were so good I wished I had thought of them first...

Come to the dark side. We have an internal light source!

In the raging war of real books vs. e-readers, I always preferred to stay on the fence. I adore books. I love to go to bookshops and just lose myself between the aisles, run my hands across the spins, sit down on the floor (no matter how cold!) and flip through the pages. It’s one of my favourite activities, and while I preferred real books over digital ones, I really didn’t see a problem with e-readers.

Now that I have a tablet I can use to read e-books, I can definitely see the appeal behind...

A review, a giveaway and a chat with Maddie Cochere on everything from writing to cake!

I recently received a tablet as a birthday gift, and I’ve been using it to catch up on reading. First on my list was Maddie Cochere’s Sunshine Hunter, a Susan Hunter mystery.

Sunshine Hunter tells the story of Susan, an athletic and attractive who just wants to have a normal life. After some boyfriend troubles, she takes some time off with her best friend and goes to Florida for the weekend… only to be followed by a different kind of trouble over there, involving a stalker and a murder on her...

I’ve been clutching books ever since.

I made a trip to the book fair in town yesterday. It opens once a year, and I always make it a point to visit it. Going to a single bookshop is one thing, but to visit a place where hundreds of bookshops are present… that’s just something else. I left with a number of bags filled with books. I think I spent a little more than I should, but I just can’t resist a good book when I see it.

In one bookshop, I found a collection of books I used to read often as a child. I plopped down before those s...

Hating a popular book is no taboo.

I’ve been reading this book that qualifies as “popular”, probably the most popular among its author’s works. Readers raved about it in their reviews, and it had a high rating on Goodreads, so I thought I’d give it a shot. It can’t be that bad, can it? Boy was I proven wrong.

After my less-than-pleasant escapades with a number of bestsellers that lured me with their pretty covers and abundance of good reviews, you would have thought I’d learn my lesson, but nope. I walked in headfirst, expectin...

Three Years Today.

Four years ago, the 4th of December would’ve passed without much thought. Seems like such an insignificant date. She didn’t even know why she chose that day. Maybe if she had been able to keep her feelings bottled up a few more days, she would’ve opted for 12-12, but she’d already waited too long.

Three years had passed, and she could still remember all the details, every word spoken. She could remember how her hands shook, how her cheeks were flushed, how her heart thumped painfully against h...

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, what is plagiarism?

I’ve heard someone say that once people start imitating you and copying your style, you know you’ve made it big. Same goes if you receive a high number of spam comments on your blog, but that’s a completely different matter. Yesterday’s WP prompt suggested writing a post in the style of another blogger, and I have to admit that I would feel flattered if someone were to do that to me. It would feel like some sort of homage.

However, at some point that homage stops being so and instead turns int...

Of silver linings and mailbox surprises.

The statistical probability of everything going wrong is directly proportional to my level of busyness; that is, the more work and obligations I have, the more likely things will go wrong… and usually when it rains on my parade, it pours. Quite a lot.

Not exactly silver, but close enough!

I was psyched for November. I had a novel idea spinning in my head and I wanted to write it, and I started NaNoWriMo with great momentum. I thought that hey, I might actually be able to get to fifty thousand w...

Coming to a Bookshelf Near You: Penny For Your Dreams

I have been terrible at posting and reading blogs lately, and I wish I could tell you it’s because I’m having the Blog? What Blog? syndrome usually associated with NaNoWriMo, but it’s not. Though… more on that later. The latest WP Daily Prompt suggested writing the summary of the book you’ve always wanted to write, and I thought this was as good a chance as any to talk about the novel that I should be writing. With less than ten days to go, I doubt I’ll get to write 50,000 words this month, b...