She became too curious about Mazen’s life to remain solely in Loulie’s head, so she allowed herself to write Mazen’s introduction in his own voice. Then, immediately after she wrapped up her very first chapter, her mind drifted. Having their meeting scene all planned out, Chelsea started the novel fully expecting she would write everything through Loulie’s point of view. She needed to mentally rewind this scene a few times before she found her entry point for Loulie and figured out how and why exactly she would meet Mazen. The first out-of-context scene that she conceptualized for him had him wandering around this marketplace. Initially, she never intended for him to be a POV character. However then Mazen, the cowardly prince, popped into her head. When she began writing it, Loulie was the only perspective she had planned for this story. It has been a joy to breathe some life into it. The novel, and the rest of the series is a love letter to her Arab heritage and to the stories that she grew up on. The minute that these two characters popped into her head, she just knew that she had to write this story in order to figure out their entire history. Behind her was her bodyguard, whom Chelsea new was a jinn.

In her mind she saw a merchant in these star-dusted robes sitting on this ship, a coin dancing across her knuckles. She mused on the idea about writing an Arab-inspired fantasy for years until this one day, where the opening scene of the novel simultaneously came to her. When she left the country to attend university in the states and began missing home, these stories were the very first thing that she latched onto as a writer. She grew up on stories “1001 Nights” and with oral stories from around the region. The central driving force behind “The Stardust” was nostalgia. When Chelsea’s not immersed in her own fictional worlds, she spends her free time doodling characters, playing video games, and hoarding all these books that she does not have the shelf space for. Consumed by wanderlust, she has set down roots in various states.Īfter she earned her MA in English at Duquesne University, she moved to New York, where she lives. Chelsea Abdullah is an American-Kuwati author born and raised in Kuwait, where she grew up hearing these stories about some mysterious desert creatures and some wily (yet only sometimes likable) heroes.

The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah