Tabisch Aliem

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2023

Stories (2)

2 Stories

2 karma pts

?

“Special Prayer for Your Boy” by Tabisch Aliem

When Lynn Archer woke up, she was sure it was the same sound as the night before. It had sliced into her sleep like glass. Only this time, it was much more insistent. She lay under the thick blanket the village woman told her was woven from a Dorcas gazelle’s pelt and listened to the sounds of the night. While the 193 Squadron Atalef had flown her twenty-two miles south of Beersheba two days ago, she’d thought to herself what the heck it was just another desert. When night came, the sounds of the night came with it. They sounded nothing like...

0 comments 0
Read story

“Carla's Summer” by Tabisch Aliem

Once she got going, the thrill of it never made her want to stop. Until the day Carla Rajabali saw a dead cat in the empty lot at the end of Chelmsford Street. It was funny the way the cat looked at a distance. Just the way cats acted, freezing still in the midst of walking when they wanted to signal to another cat they meant no trouble, that they were just passing by. The two girls, a good full eleven years, and the boy, just a little older, approached the cat, expecting it to lunge ahead any minute, hearing the shuffle of their feet in the...

0 comments 0
Read story

Author bio

There was a time I started working in journalism, without an inkling of where I was going. Then, I tried my hand at content marketing and it was the starkest lesson I ever had in blasé. But I understand much better now what content marketing means for the business one wants to pursue. Then I got into ghostwriting fiction. I come from a vanity press background, and the clients I got assigned to were exclusively from the USA and they all loved seeing their projects come to life through me. Unfortunately, since they got in touch with a vanity press, they never got to know who was writing for them. Having serious reservations against the business model of the contractors I worked for, and realizing the difference between vanity press and actual trade publishing, I walked out, so I could work on improving my craft and find people whom I could directly interact with, whether for collaboration or to help them get their personal project off the ground. I've stuck to this line of work ever since I began more than 3 years back, and it doesn't look like I'm going to stop anytime soon. Personally, I like writers like Elmore Leonard, Loren D. Estleman, Stephen King, Shaun Hutson, Ed McBain, Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Gene Wolfe, Angela Carter and many newer writers too. Writers should be able to see the universality of storytelling. Sometimes they let genre snag them without really taking the time to understand the tropes that operate behind different genres. A single trope can encompass characters of various colors, because it's how you 'tell the trope', it's how you 'reveal the character'. Why did Stephen King never care about calling himself a horror writer? Why was Harlan Ellison always ready to punch the living lights out of you if you called him a Sci-fi writer to his face? Technicality in art is important but it's not the story. I believe in writing for the reader alone. I believe Reedsy is one of the best places on the web to find what new writers are doing. Reedsy's got a great content marketing strategy. So, hey, it's good to be with you!