snarky – R. Leonia Shea

When I first started imagining the jinn realms, I didn’t want to lean purely on folklore because if jinn were around in the time of Alexander the Great (as they were), then surely they would have evolved just as much as the human world did, right?

I love legend as much as the next fantasy writer, but I also love grounding my magic in something that feels like it could be real if the stars aligned, and well, magic really was running rampant. Enter science – the salvation and bane of my existence.

So – trick question – what’s abundant in the regions traditionally associated with jinn?
Sand.
Endless, shimmering, heat-blasted sand. And camels, but more on those in a later post.

Sand means silica, and silica has hi-tech potential. Years ago, I saw this video, and sometimes a spark of inspiration isn’t recognized as such until SUDDENLY IT IS! I had the seed of a civilization whose technology wasn’t based on metal or electricity, but on heat-shaped glass, crystalline structures, and silica-based energy systems. A world built from the very substance that humans have access to as well, but the jinn are way ahead of us. I wanted the world to feel familiar and possible, and glass gives me that.

The next question was: Keep the flying carpets?

Of course, when you’re drawing inspiration from a region filled with deep folklore, you bump into those classic motifs: Flying carpets. Bottled spirits. Mischievous wish-granters. I’ve already accounted for the last two, but those carpets were a hurdle…because some legends slide naturally into a fantasy world and others…can feel trite.

But that’s what fantasy writers do. We make those hard decisions: Keep what readers expect, or let it go if it doesn’t serve the story?

Flying carpets have a certain charm — portable, whimsical, and instantly recognizable. But in a silica-tech world? Did they fit? Would they feel too easy? Too literal?

Then I realized something that Pops has told Ari dozens of times:

Stories don’t appear out of nowhere. They’re rooted in some real observation, however distorted.

Which got me wondering…

What If the Flying Carpet Myth Started With the Jinn Themselves?

Maybe humans glimpsed something extraordinary and explained it the best way they could.

A distant shimmer.
A figure gliding over the desert.
The mirage-like wave of dunes moving under something that shouldn’t have been able to move that way.

“Flying carpet,” they might have said, because what else is flexible enough to float and glide over terrain?

But what if they weren’t flying?
What if they were surfing?

Not on water, but on sand. Using what was available because of their magic and affinity with fire?

Suddenly, the origin of the flying carpet makes perfect sense (if you can get over that whole magic thing – which I have no problem doing). Remember – magic was once the default answer for anything that didn’t make sense!

Humans saw a silhouette moving across dunes fast and smooth enough to defy belief. Imaginations did what imaginations do – related it to something familiar (carpet) and then it got a little magical glow up – poof! – genies on flying carpets!

Science + Myth = My Favorite Kind of Magic

At the end of the day, that’s the sweet spot for me in worldbuilding: the place where science deepens myth rather than replaces it – and somehow makes everything seem possible.

It’s also pretty cool that I can make surfing jinn a thing.

I was that kid in elementary school who couldn’t wait for the Mythology Unit to come around. In fact, Apollo was perhaps my first crush, or maybe it was Justin from The Secret of N.I.M.H. It was a long time ago.

But just because I’m a bit fuzzy on the timeline doesn’t mean those two things didn’t leave an enormous impact on my life. My fascination with mythology has always been present, carrying me from Mount Olympus to Joseph Campbell and the archetypes of Carl Jung. These days, I usually begin a book with a specific geographic region in mind. Then I’m off on a hunt for myths and legends that might make for an interesting adventure for my main character in the Relic Hunter Series.

When I first started writing, I set my story in familiar territory to me: the Jersey Pines. Being a Jersey girl made the location feel personal, but I still needed a reason to send a disgruntled archaeologist desperate for a fresh start wandering through the Pines. I had a vague notion about healing trees, so I went searching for more information, knowing I wanted to ground my stories in legends. I often say that I use the setting and the mythology as the structure to hang my characters on, and that’s as true today as it was the first time I flipped open my laptop.

I don’t always stay true to the legends. That’s one of the benefits of being a fantasy writer. I want the stories to feel familiar enough to make readers feel at home, but I twist most of the myths just enough to give my characters better angles to grow from. The Pines and the Native American tribes who lived there gave rise to the inclusion of Coyote in my first book. And I have to admit, I’ve let him drive the narrative as much as Arienne has. He’s mythical, legendary, and just human enough to make reviewers keep mentioning him. Coyote was the structure from which Kai blossomed.

The Relic Hunter Series travels the world now, but honestly, I could have stayed in New Jersey forever. Every country’s mythology is rich and varied, overflowing with transformative stories deeply rooted in culture, geography, and worldview. There’s no shortage of inspiration for anyone willing to dig – and I just happen to love the digging.

At the heart of it all, myths give me a place to start. They’re the skeleton of the story that I can bend, shape, and sometimes completely twist to fit the characters who show up demanding space on the page. They’re ancient, familiar, and endlessly surprising, and they let me explore the world one legend at a time. And those legends have led me to dig deeper, and what I’ve found is a vast common ground that so many cultures share. But that’s a discovery for a future post.