Loretta of the Lamp is a Young Adult Fantasy novel complete at 140,000 words.

Sixteen year old Loretta knows how to pick a lock faster than you can say “juvenile delinquent”. But there is a story behind every trouble maker, and Loretta’s journey is only just beginning. Breaking into a forgotten storage annex of the British Museum seems like a great idea, but things quickly spiral out of control when she unlocks an ancient lamp only to wind up trapped inside it, bound to an immortal genie.

“Loretta” is my answer to a genre overrun with werewolves, demigods, zombies and vampires where the genies of our earliest storytelling nights around the fire have been long forgotten, left trapped in a lamp of literary myth and legend.

WHAT MOTIVATED ME TO WRITE LORETTA OF THE LAMP?

In short, my fascination with people and places are what inspired the tale, the complication of humanity, and the beauty of culture discovered through travel.

From the moment I first arrived in Morocco and walked into the medina in Marrakech, Loretta’s world—the land inside the Lamp—began to grow on my mind. Burnished bronze lamps for sale in the souq, magic spells in the Berber square, snails boiled in pepper and water, and the rich romance of moorish architecture are the foundations on which the world took form.

But it wasn’t just a world inside a lamp that needed creating, Loretta—a misadventurous and troubled teen, and Akil—an immortal genie, were two very complicated people who had stories to be told.

Akil wears his heart on his sleeve from the word go, bitter and angry about his predicament and the anguish of being an immortal trapped by an ancient curse, alive yet never having lived.

Loretta is more subtle, at sixteen she believes she is above the burden of society and not trapped by the desire to fit in. We begin to learn her back story through her dreams, first hand retellings of the journey she has been on to make her feel the way she does about life.

The process of dealing with a complicated and unexpectedly sad childhood is a theme I enjoyed exploring, addressing the human tendency to place ourselves on a path toward destruction when we are hit an event or a series of events that we cannot deal with.

ABOUT ME

Born and raised in Rotorua, New Zealand, geothermal gateway to the centre of the earth, my childhood was a juxtaposition of harsh realities and beautiful fantasy. My adulthood has been entirely London, city of colour and culture, history and darkness, where I’ve learned that words are tools we can carve and twist to shape worlds in the imagination of those around us. By day I am a creative account manager for a media company, and write for online magazines. By night I spend time with my pet snake, enjoy London’s alternative-goth scene, and I carve stories.