As mentioned earlier, I was happy to be part of the team bringing Broken Shadows to the light (pun intended)
I wanted a touch of geometric symmetry of Square Kufi and to try using it in Lain Alphabet. My target was to present something more sophisticated than a normal font and of course that the design is tailored specifically to the title, while maintaining the appeal to an international audience.
And it all begins with the pen and paper.
And then it turns out into this:
I’m glad to post here that my friend Tarek Refaat has finally published his new book. Last Thursday was the unvailing and it was welcomed with great enthousiasm.
I hope you will like the design of the cover title, it is one of my trials in discovering usages of the Kufi script.
Stay tuned for the work progress!
Title: Broken Shadows
Author: Tarek Refaat
Release Date: April 8, 2016
Publisher: Red Sands Publishing
Genre: Thriller, Crime, Suspense, International
Book Description:
Broken hearts and dark shadows, will love ever find its way back to them?
Fifteen years ago, Heidi Aasar fled the country, hoping to make sense of the chaos that
surrounded her. A burned ex-operative, she refuses to continue hiding in the shadows.
She now has the chance to right the wrongs of her dark past. Determined to find a way to
redeem herself, she must first fix the loose threads she left behind so long ago.
A successful business owner, Nadim Mohamed Sharaf has done his best to move on after
his heart was broken fifteen years ago. In his mind, he has everything he could ever want
or need at his fingertips. Until the moment Heidi makes a sudden reappearance in his life.
It’s then everything around him changes.
A chain reaction of events soon turns Nadim and Heidi’s lives upside-down. Forced to
confront the turmoil brewing between them, they must put aside their differences if they
are to survive another day. The choices they’ll have to make will define the outcome of
the lives they lead.
Will they be able to overcome their painful and chaotic past? Or will the pain and
heartache consume them in the long run?
(Purchase links are not yet available.)
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28927401-broken-shadows
EXCERPT:
AFTER A LONG DAY AT WORK, Nadim stood in his office,
observing Cairo from the seventeen stories high window. The streets below were
crowded. He could see the people rushing to get back to their homes, eager for a little
respite from a hard day’s work.
Cabs pulled up to the curb along the two-way street to pick up clients and those eager to
get away from the ensuing chaos. People scurried about like rats trapped inside a maze.
Some greeted others in a timely fashion, while others grew surly and shouted obscenities.
Nadim smirked and shook his head. He was used to this scene spreading out before him.
It wouldn’t be long until he joined the ‘rats’ trapped in their own chaotic mazes. The
thought of making his way home appealed to him.
His mind wandered, trapping him in another maze. A maze that took him back fifteen
years. One that brought back memories he’d spent a lifetime trying to avoid. Memories
he wished he could forget, once and for all.
Nadim thought he’d forgotten all about her, the one woman who’d broken his heart.
She’d meant everything to him. He would have given her the world if she’d asked him to.
During his high school days, he’d been known as a playboy. A sweet-talker who’d gotten
exactly what he’d wanted. Charming and attentive, every girl in school came to him for
advice about guys. Most of them ended up hooking up with him.
He’d experienced the same throughout college and work until he’d met her. Beautiful and
brazen, she’d wrapped him around her finger. She’d drawn him in like a moth to flame,
inciting his baser desires. In the end, she’d played him like a smooth violin, cutting its
strings with a scalpel so that it made no noise, whatsoever.
Nadim growled with annoyance. He never thought he’d ever see her again. After fifteen
years, the bane of his existence had popped up in his life once more. Heidi had recently
dropped by his office for an interview.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tarek Refaat is an Egyptian author born in October 1980. He comes from a family that
has diverse cultural roots, and has spent most of his adulthood between Saudi and Egypt,
until finally settling in Egypt.
Tarek is an avid reader of history, and has been into writing since a very young age. He
loves to describe the thoughts and feelings he’s experienced through words. He has
written poetry and prose, and decided as of 2009 to move forward into stories and novels.
Tarek has previously been published, and has also self-published. He views writing as his
aim to reach as many people through his thoughts, and provoke positive and hopeful
energy through his stories.
SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS:
Website/Blog: http://forgottenrealms.me
Twitter: https://twitter.com/energizre
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Tarek-Refaat-142437057778
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4919674.Tarek_Refaat
Email: Tarek.h.refaat@live.com
Photos from “Arabic Graffiti”, Pascal Zoghbi, Don Stone Karl, (Goodreads – Amazon)
Highly recommended!
“The Oriental Pages Collection”, Malik Anas Al-Rajab
“The Oriental Pages Collection”, Malik Anas Al-Rajab
“الوطن ليس المكان أو التراب الذي يولد فيه الإنسان وإنما المكان الذي يستطيع فيه أن يتحرك” – عبد الرحمن منيف
Obhur , Jedda, 2012
على الدنيا بعدك العفا – Abu Saiba, Sar, Bahrain 2008
Hamra, Beyrouth, Lebanon
Karantina, Beyrouth, Lebanon
Lebanon
El Seed – Montreal, Canada, 2008
El Seed – Montreal, Canada, 2008
El Seed 2009
احتاج تاريخي – El Seed
Julien Breton 2009
Julien Breton 2006
Julien Breton 2007
احترام – Julien Breton 2010
Julien Breton
Jacques Bournat
Khuraif, Weimar, Germany 2008
يا غنماتي قولوا وراي – Ahmad Sabbagh , Amman , Jordan 2010
Mohammed Ali, London, 2009
Mohammed Ali, Dubai 2010
A Spinozan view of child development sees the opposite of wish-fulfillment. There are rules, constrains, that limit what we can do. The child learns, as she grows, to modify her plans as she perceives more of the rules. Initially, she might attempt to cross the room assuming that the chair is not an obstacle, when it doesn’t move out of her way, she will feel frustration, a ‘passion’. And throws a paddy. Later, as she constructs her path to avoid the chair, more of her plans will peaceably, and successfully, come to fruition. As she grows and learns more of the rules -God’s Will or the warp and woof of universal causation- this progressive success will produce a calm acceptance of constraints: peace rather than passion.
بعد كده اتكلم عن أهمية أن الواحد يتعلم من القصص اللي البطل فيها بيفشل في تحقيق هدفه مرة و اتنين، و ازاي ده بيخلي الواحد يركز على التعلم من أخطائه و اكتساب الخبرة. فالقصص البدائية في نظره، البطل فيها بيلاقي المصباح و يقعد يدعك فيه لغاية ما يطلع له الجني يحقق له رغباته. أما القصص المفيدة من وجهة نظره، هي اللي البطل الأولاني القوي يحاول الزواج من ست الحسن و الجمال ، لكنه يفشل. ييجي أخوه يحاول يتعلم من أخطاء الأول و يبين للقارئ (المتعلم) صعوبة المهمة. لكنه يفشل لأن العلام مش بالساهل. و بعدين ييجي الأخ التالت اللي بيتعلم من فشل الأول و خبرة التاني و ينجح.
جايز القارئ العادي ميفكرش في كسب ود ست الحسن و الجمال، لكنه بعد ما يكبر، ممكن يستفيد من بذرة القصة ديه لما يشتغل في مشروع أو في عمله.
الحتة ديه جايباها من الويكي بتاعه:
Our minds make stories, and stories make our minds. Each culture’s Make-a-Human kit is built from stories, and maintained by stories. A story can be a rule for living according to one’s culture, a useful survival trick, a clue to the grandeur of the universe, or a mental hypothesis about what might happen if we pursue a particular course. Stories map out the phase space of existence
عجبتني أوي make-a-human-kit 🙂
و أخيراً قال:
Narrativium makes a different kind of mind from the tribal one, which is all ‘do this because we’ve always done it that way and it woks’ and ‘don’t do that because it’s taboo, evil, and we’ll kill you if you do’. And it also differs from the barbairian mind: ‘That way lies honour, booty, much wealth and many children(if I can only get a djinn, or a dgun); I would not demean myself, dishonour these hands, with menial work.” ……. The reader of tales that have been moulded and informed by narrativium is prepared to do whatever an understanding of the task requires
“My way of approaching Allah -may his name be praised- has been through calligraphy, and the search for the perfect meaning of each word. A single letter requires us to distill in it all the energy it contains, as if we were carving out its meaning. When sacred texts are written, they contain the soul of the man who served as an instrument to spread them throughout the world. And that doesn’t apply only to sacred texts, but to every mark we place on paper. Because the hand that draws each line reflects the soul of the person making that line.”
On Calligraphy from “The Witch of Portobello”
a very nice read
I heard about it from 2 different trainers, one of them was giving us a quick course on mind mapping and the other about scenario building. So for a long time it was on my list and I finally finished it.
It can fool you as an easy read, and it is to some extent, but it has a problem of going in circles around the same idea for a long time. Nevertheless, I was rewarded every now and then with a brilliant idea, so it was ok at the end of the day.
Here are some of the words I liked:
“You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. If I have to go after what I call the narrative disciplines, my best tool is a narrative.
Ideas come and go, stories stay.”
“I noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people—really, they were not the experts and they knew it.”
“awareness of a problem does not mean much—particularly when you have special interests and self-serving institutions in play.”
“Now, there are other themes arising from our blindness to the Black Swan:
a. We focus on preselected segments of the seen and generalize from it to the unseen: the error of confirmation.
b. We fool ourselves with stories that cater to our Platonic thirst for distinct patterns: the narrative fallacy.
c. We behave as if the Black Swan does not exist: human nature is not programmed for Black Swans.
d. What we see is not necessarily all that is there. History hides Black Swans from us and gives us a mistaken idea about the odds of these events: this is the distortion of silent evidence.
e. We “tunnel”: that is, we focus on a few well-defined sources of uncertainty, on too specific a list of Black Swans (at the expense of the others that do not easily come to mind).”
“The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.”
“Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept. H”
“The first problem is that information is costly to obtain.
The second problem is that information is also costly to store—like real estate in New York. The more orderly, less random, patterned, and narratized a series of words or symbols, the easier it is to store that series in one’s mind or jot it down in a book so your grandchildren can read it someday.”
“A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness”
“For me, one such antilogic came with the discovery—thanks to the literature on cognition—that, counter to what everyone believes, not theorizing is an act—that theorizing can correspond to the absence of willed activity, the “default” option. It takes considerable effort to see facts (and remember them) while withholding judgment and resisting explanations.”
“On the day when Eutropia’s inhabitants feel the grip of weariness and no one can bear any longer his job, his relatives, his house and his life, debts, the people he must greet or who greet him, then the whole citizenry decides to move to the next city, which is there waiting for them, empty and good as new; there each will take up a new job, a different wife, will see another landscape on opening his window, and will spend his time with different pastimes, friends, gossip. So their life is renewed from move to move, among cities whose exposure or declivity or streams or winds make each site somehow different from the others. Since their society is ordered without great distinctions of wealth or authority, the passage from one function to another takes place almost without jolts; variety is guaranteed by the multiple assignments, so that in the span of a lifetime a man rarely returns to a job that has already been his.
Thus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the actors changed; they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents; they open alternate mouths in identical yawns. Alone, among all the cities of the empire, Eutropia remains always the same. Mercury, god of the fickle, to whom the city is sacred, worked this ambiguous miracle.”
“Yes, the empire is sick, and, what is worse, it is trying to become accustomed to its sores. This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply. If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.”
“The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
the passage from one function to another takes place almost without jolts; variety is guaranteed by the multiple assignments, so that in the span of a lifetime a man rarely returns to a job that has already been his. Thus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the actors changed; they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents; they open alternate mouths in identical yawns. Alone, among all the cities of the empire, Eutropia remains always the same.
“Yes, the empire is sick, and, what is worse, it is trying to become accustomed to its sores. This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply. If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.”
Kaleidoscope 