Last night, in media

I churned through the short story collection The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories (2017) in the past few days because it was due back at the library. A decent read with lots of Middle Eastern, Asian and cross-cultural perspectives. Hardly any romance despite the title, which was fine. The first story, Kamila Shamsie's "The Congregation," came perhaps closest with its human protagonist longing for his lost djinn brother. A few authors had fun riffing on the mythology in sci fi and future-dystopian settings (E.J. Swift, Saad Z. Hossain, Jamal Mahjoub). I also particularly liked Kirsty Logan's "The Spite House," in which a djinn struggles with the simultaneous power and entrapment of finding they can grant wishes, and Sami Shah's "Reap," in which U.S. military staffers remote-monitoring a neighborhood with a Taliban operative witness a possession they can't explain. IMO the reprinting of Neil Gaiman's American Gods chapter on Salim and the ifrit was unnecessary, especially since another white author who'd notably written about djinn, Helene Wecker, came up with a new story for this volume.

Having djinn on the brain motivated me last night to open that languishing Jinni/Dustfinger crossover fic I swore to finish this year. It's not even long; I just lost the initial momentum in, er, 2016. Added a few lines, bridged a gap that had been bothering me, wrote a sentence that restored a little bit of my confidence that I can still do this fiction-writing thing.

I also finished a poorly acted movie called Dot the I (2003) that featured an infuriating plot about three men manipulating a woman plus an "edgy" message about the ethics and trickeries of moviemaking. However, as it also starred baby James D'Arcy, baby Gael Garcia Bernal and baby Tom Hardy, I couldn't look away. It has a 25% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which seems fair. One critic praised an "unpredictable twist" toward the end of the film that you could only not see coming if you believe the main character would go out of her way to resume a relationship with a man after finding out [spoiler] he followed and filmed her for months without her knowledge despite her history of being stalked, swapped a marriage certificate for a release form and faked his own death to obtain an ~authentic performance~ from her. Bleh.

Anyway. The fic and the movie are clearly to blame -- or rather, to be credited -- for a nice dream I had this morning about kissing Tom Hardy for a long time on a couch. It carried me through a busy workday and another spate of depressing national news. Now, speed skating and snowboarding on TV.

How are/were your Tuesdays?