It took me eight years to get my first book published. Lots of trial and error and lots of rejection. I basically kept sending stories to publishers until they said ‘yes’.

Read my article: How to get published. Or take my course on Teachable: https://rukhsanaworkshops.teachable.com/

Please don’t email me and ask me for more advice. I have a very limited amount of time and I need to work on my own books.

I’m actually not sponsoring Kareem anymore. He’s a man now. But I’m sponsoring other kids. They’re between the age of eight and eleven years old.

I like to write because I like stories. When I’m writing a story it’s like I’m watching it happen in front of my eyes. I’m just writing it down. The characters in the story make me laugh and sometimes cry. It’s a lot of fun.

The idea for The Roses In My Carpets I got from one picture of my visit to Pakistan. For Bedtime Ba-a-alk I got the idea when I tried to go to sleep after getting up at 4:30 in the morning to pray. I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I imagined some sheep to count but two of the sheep were talking to eachother instead of jumping over the fence. I told them to come on, jump! But one of them, an old ram, just looked at me and said, “Who the heck are you?” I thought it was funny so I sat up and wrote this story. For the stories of Muslim Child I got the ideas from things that had happened. For Ruler of the Courtyard, my brother’s wife told me that when she was a girl in Pakistan she was afraid of the chickens in the courtyard. I thought that was funny, so I wrote Ruler of the Courtyard. For King of the Skies, a story about a boy who can’t walk but can really fly kites, I got the idea when I was in Pakistan, during that same trip when I got the idea for The Roses In My Carpets. I saw some kites high in the sky. They were “fighting” and the people flying them were trying to cut eachother’s strings. That’s the game they play in Pakistan. I thought of a story of a kid who couldn’t walk but would be so good at fighting with kites that he was the King of the Skies.

I am lucky because I come from about three different cultures. I am Pakistani, that’s one culture. I am Canadian, that’s another culture. And I’m Muslim, that’s another culture. In the stories I write, I try to make the stories fun for anyone from any culture to read because no matter what culture we come from, we’re all human. I think culture represents different ways of thinking and doing things that we all do. It represents different ways of eating foods – yum! It represents different ways of wearing clothes – pretty! and different ways of saying things – languages. So even though in some ways my culture is exactly like the cultures of the people in my stories, in other ways I’m completely different. When I write a story I try to think like the person in the story. Sometimes that person wouldn’t know some of the things that I know, so I have to let that person not know them and write the story as if I didn’t know them too. It’s not always easy. Sometimes I want to change what they’d know so that it’s more like what I know, but that would be cheating, so I don’t.

I don’t have one favorite. They’re so different from each other. I love them all. But I think the most important stories I’ve written are: The Roses In My Carpets; Wanting Mor; Surviving Pleasant Valley.

My first name was the name of a princess. I think it was the name of Alexander the Great’s wife Roxanne. It sounds the same. It also has a meaning in Persian. My mother told me it means “girl with rosy cheeks”. People tell me that it suits me. My last name, Khan, means “king” or “ruler”. You might notice that a couple of my stories have these words in the title. (ie. Ruler of the Courtyard, King of the Skies)

I love stories, especially children’s books and I wanted to share the stories that grow in my head with other kids.

I started writing when I was thirteen years old but those books couldn’t be published. I started writing books seriously in 1989.

Yes! I do. Because I come from another culture I like to show how people in my culture feel about things and how differently we think too.

I love to garden. I love growing flowers and I like telling stories and folktales, I love being with my grandchildren and I LOVE reading!

Some people told me I couldn’t become an author. Even some relatives have told me I couldn’t do it because of the way I dress. When they told me I can’t, I was determined to show them I could. So even when my stories were rejected, I kept trying because I believed they were good.