Mina Khan on How Stories Get Written

Welcome Guest Author Mina Khan!
I'm pleased to welcome Mina back to the blog today to celebrate the release of a new story and the birthday of her first book, The Djinn's Dilemma. Mina has a giveaway and a great topic for us, so here she is...
How Stories Get Written
I was recently reading an interview by Khaled Hosseini about writing and he mentioned that he’d intended his debut book The Kite Runner to be a simple, nostalgic short story about two boys and their love of kite flying.
Instead, it turned into this mega-successful, dark and poignant literary novel that grabs hold of readers’ hearts and squeezes.
Hosseini explained the change with: “But stories have a will of their own….”
Such true words.
When I first started thinking of writing The Djinn’s Dilemma, my debut story, about an assassin who falls for his target, I had a very different vision for it. Originally the assassin was a cynical, aloof woman and it was going to be straight forward romantic suspense. Nothing paranormal about it, and definitely no genies involved. Ha!
Not one but two genies showed up, and the assassin turned into smoking hot male…yeah, I quit complaining at that point and just wrote. And I ended up having an exhilarating adventure with flying genies, ricocheting bullets, and dangerous magic.
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If I hadn’t gone with the story’s will, I wouldn’t be here today celebrating the first birthday of The Djinn’s Dilemma with an awesome birthday bash full of SurPrizes (including a special Sherrilyn Kenyon package, exotic art and more!). Make sure you check it out!
But sometimes stories push us out of our comfort zone and into unchartered territories. That can be scary. Very scary. Such was the case with my multicultural short, Dead: A Ghost Story.
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Unlike my other published stories, Dead is NOT a romance. In it, Nasreen, the Indian-American protagonist, grapples with her life and death in West Texas.
Dead was inspired by the many immigrant wives I met during my time as a business reporter in West Texas. For the most part these women are invisible to the mainstream society for various reasons – language barriers, isolation, and unfamiliarity with their adopted country’s laws and social mores etc. So this story was written to recognize them and to highlight a usually silent part of the immigrant experience.
I have readers who love my genie romances, so why not write another one instead of trying on a completely different genre? Because the idea of all the invisible Nasreens in the world sort of haunted me until I’d written the story. In doing so, I discovered a different side of myself, a new voice inside.

Giveaway!Thanks for visiting with me! Don’t forget to check out the #DjinnsDilemmaBirthdayBash…also share a comment with your thoughts about stories and leave your email address…and you may be randomly chosen to receive a Kindle edition of Dead: A Ghost Story. Open to international. Ends midnight EST November 19.

Author Bio:
Mina Khan is a Texas-based writer and food enthusiast. She grew up in Bangladesh on stories of djinns (pronounced "gins"), ghosts and monsters. These childhood fancies now color her fiction. She daydreams of hunky paranormal heroes, magic, mayhem and mischief and writes them down as tales of romance and adventure. Her first published work, The Djinn's Dilemma, won the novella category of the 2012 Romance Through The Ages (published) contest.
Fifty percent of the proceeds from her second novella, A Tale of Two Djinns, is donated to UNICEF for education. Two Djinns is a Romeo & Juliet tale with genies, feminists and a happy ending.
For more information on Mina Khan, check out: Amazon| Blog | Facebook | Goodreads | Twitter
Thanks so much for reading! Don't forget to leave Mina some comment love to enter to win! 
Laura