Shami & Humi - The Facebook Factor

This is one of the most amazing stories of my life.

I'd met Shamila through a mutual friend, on facebook, about a little more than two years ago. We shared the same interests - more or less - and had the same kind of dark sense of humor - more or less. So basically, we hit it off quite fabulously and added each other to our profiles, high fived at every mutual respect, or lack thereof, for current issues and personal affairs until one fine day, Shami came up with this brilliant exercise. She inboxed about 30 ladies with the intent of starting a 'I write the first line and you all join in and let's make a story!' event.

Truth to tell, it was quite boring intially and I simply stayed becuase I was too kooky to not to. The first few weeks went by with all of us failing to add more than five words to the single outrageous paragraph (which I don't even remember correctly now) that Shami herself had written.

But then something wonderful happened.

One of the girls wrote a single line about the heroine of the story landing in the bedroom of an unknown person. That sparked a fire in my brain and I wrote an entire paragraph that day just to make this turn happen in the story. And it did. And although, one by one, everyone else had stopped writing (and reading) the posts, Shamila and I stuck to it. So much so that we had two full pages of the tale. We then decided to close that session and start a new one including just her, me and two other friends who had proved themselves to be loyal readers of everything that we had written so far.

And so we wrote and we wrote. Chapter after chapter after chapter after chapter. While Humzy and T-Man read it and critiqued it. We had moved to email by then since it felt more perosnal and private. This delicious ritual of writing continued for two whole years. What had started as an idle facebook fluke became a full fledged novel boasting of two hefty parts (read BOOKS!).
 
The first book AOIFE AND DEMON: CURSED BE THE SYHLAINS! is now published by New Concepts Publishing and available as one of their titles through their website. Get your own copy here and keep your eyes peeled for more things and anything from Humeira and Shamila!

Trust me - it'll be awesome ;)