Me And Sinbad

                                                              Public Domain

 I’ve recently been searching the markets for potential homes for my existing stories, as well as potential homes for stories I might write, eg themed anthologies. It’s not easy to find a home for the stories I have. There are a few, written over the last few years, which have not sold, for one reason or another. Two of them are novella length, one Arthurian, the other an urban fantasy murder mystery with werewolves. Hardly anyone is buying novellas, or if they are, not the kind I have written. 

So, when I found a themed anthology based on the Arabian Nights, I got very excited for about two minutes, because I have a story on that theme! In it, Aladdin is not a nice young man - well, he isn’t in the original fairy tale, in which he is presented as a lazy good for nothing who is not bothering to run his late father’s tailor shop, so needs a wish-granting djinn to survive. But in my story, he’s thoroughly nasty. The story is seen from the viewpoint of the Princess and the Djinn. 

Yes! A market at last, right? Um, no. Guess which was the only story on that theme they don’t want? I gather they have had too much Disneyfied Aladdin. 

So... I downloaded a copy of the 1001 Nights, though I do have one somewhere in paperback and read it years ago, to reread and get ideas. I am considering having a go at a Sinbad story. There is plenty of potential for a rousing fantasy adventure in this. 

You are no doubt familiar with it, the story of the guy who went on seven voyages and had various adventures. Ray Harryhausen did some Sinbad movies, one of which featured Tom Baker as a baddie, another of which had another Doctor, PatrickTroughton, as a nutty but likeable Greek scientist with a daughter. 

But the original Sinbad isn’t a swashbuckling adventurer, he’s not even a sailor as such. He’s a merchant, though one who gets bored sitting at home, so he likes adventure. 

In the 1001 Nights, Sinbad is telling his story over seven days, to a bunch of friends and a porter who wants to know why he has to work hard for a living while Sinbad is hugely rich. 

“Well, you know, I wasn’t always rich,” says Sinbad over dinner. And he tells his story. Most of the voyages start with Sinbad getting bored and putting together some goods to sell and sailing off in a ship which gets wrecked in a storm. He is always the sole survivor, even if a few others are with him at first. They generally get eaten. 

Somehow, whether he is threatened by a sort of Arabian Nights version of the Cyclops or the Old Man Of The Sea(unlike in Greek myth, he doesn’t shape shift, he sits on your back and won’t let go), he escapes and ends up coming home richer than before, usually due to finding gems of one kind or another. A couple of times he also gets his original goods back because the ship was okay after all. 

Interestingly, Sinbad’s voyages have a bit of the flavour of the story told by Odysseus to the Phaeacians in Homer’s Odyssey. 

So, do I give Sinbad an eighth voyage, perhaps? Even though he is noft a young man any more, and already protested when the Caliph asked him to be an ambassador? Should I slip in some Greek mythology? Am I even allowed to? I will have to ask. Meanwhile my brain is churning with possibilities, and I was playing with them in my mind in the local pool today. I do find I can “write” stuff in my head while swimming.

Wish me luck!