I’m honored to have you read my blog, delighted and impressed by how many people the ‘Fresh-Pressed’ award brought me. But, looking at this page, I realized I could talk a bit about my two novels, both published by small presses (Imajin Books and Eternal Press) in the past year.
I grew up in Nigeria until the year part of the country declared independence as Biafra, and we Americans received midnight orders to evacuate. Night Must Wait follows the adventures of four American women caught up in this war, balancing in the roles forced by the fact that they do not belong and have no right to interfere with internal affairs of a sovereign nation. Of course, they cannot keep from falling.
Future Past is a more difficult novel in many ways, and I want to warn anyone who’s read Night Must Wait, that Future Past begins with our Free World losing a war that has straggled on over decades of inconclusive strife. My narrator, Ash, has a solution for saving his nation, and engineers a virus to take out the tide of passionate reactionaries rising to victory. He launches genocide, but things don’t go exactly as he planned — the consequences reach after him for the rest of his days. Future Past is a novel of human redemption, of the powers of even casual friendship, and the changes that we all make in each other. Is the end a happy one? Maybe you’ll tell me.
I’m presently working on three other manuscripts, one literary fiction, two science fiction/horror. Writing and rewriting, answering my agent’s challenges and corrections, pacing around the house and pausing sometimes to pat a cat.
I want to make one more comment on this business of books. No one who writes, sells books. We offer characters, love and memory, possibility, the past and the future. We hand over hope. Should these things be matters of trade? Maybe, maybe not. All of my life I have made things, stories, paintings, and more stories, and I have come to see my own life as a complicated story with strong themes that shape what I do and how I do it. I want to share, I want to change your mind by what I share, even if only by some increment, so that you see a color, a foggy street, or a beetle creeping about its business– in a new way.
Every time I write or paint, I learn. Every reader or viewer who tells me something about what I made can surprise me, inspire me. Let’s travel together a little while and talk.
