Book seven of The Genie Whisperer, The Lost Libraries, released this past Monday! I’m so excited for the release of Season Three (books seven and eight). It’s only been three months since the release of book six, but it feels like I’ve been waiting ages for this. 

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The last season of The Genie Whisperer (books four and five) took place nearly entirely in the Archives. In a way, Ali and the genies varied their location since they bounced from pocket dimension to pocket dimension, but all of it still technically took place within one location. That made things extra fun for writing The Lost Libraries where Ali and the genies go international!

This time, rather than surviving whatever the Archives throws at them, the theme is hunting down ancient lost libraries in an attempt to find the missing history of how The Society came to be. This, of course, requires the heroes of The Genie Whisperer to travel to multiple countries in search of these lost libraries and their missing contents.

I feel like like the word missing in regard to anything historical (such as missing libraries) leads to such a sense of mystery. Or maybe that’s just because I’m a bit of a history dork. That also meant I enjoyed doing a bit of research into these lost libraries! I started at this handy Listverse website that lists ten lost libraries. I only ended up using one from the list, partially since not all of them fit within the timeline I needed, but it was a great place to start, and fun to learn about the others. 

Another fun aspect of writing this season was coming up with the villains. I’ve known for a long time that these two books would entail Ali and the others searching for The Society’s lost history, but that alone wasn’t enough to make up a story. I needed bad guys to up the tension and to be part of the climax. I debated between several potential options before settling on who I chose. 

The only thing that makes me sad is that I almost foreshadowed these villains in book one, The Glittering Gems. But I didn’t know at the time if I would ever include them in the actual story, and it felt like dumping too much world building on the reader at once, so I took it out. But at least they were still on my mind for me to whip out here!