There I was.
Watching a Teen Romcom on a Friday night. Then, the female lead uttered a line to her love interest. A line that seemed so familiar to me. It felt like it was lifted from one of my unpublished works. An unpublished work that was sitting in my hard drive. As I tried to comprehend how that could be, then it came to me, my long-awaited Eureka! moment. The moment that urged me to get off my ass and do something with my COVID19 pandemic lockdown time.
I will self-publish my anthology of poems, shorts and pieces.
So I did. Starting with the Notes to a Negro anthology.
What is Notes to a Negro?
"Notes to a Negro," is a compilation of essays, pieces, emails, texts and salacious smut inspired by and written for a certain paramour which I chose to call "Negro," who represents the quintessential hard-to-love-and-understand Black Man. It also speaks to the personal internal struggle that brews in the woman as she struggles to unravel this love and deal with the consequences of loving that obsessively.
The material is very personal, deep, provocative, saucy and raunchy. To a certain extent I wasn't sure I wanted to be attached to it publicly or have anyone who knows me, know and attach it to me. But the best material I've come to believe is the raw content from your unfiltered life and as writers we experience life whole and cut a lot deeper than the general population so what else can we lay to bear for our readers than the open cuts and how we have healed from them. That's what this material which to me is a little ahead of it's time in terms of subversive female material is. Coincidentally, in between working on it's compilation, the music video for WAP, the new single from Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion was released with all the controversy that it stirred up on Social Media as to its overt female sexual content and explicit language. Once the conversation ignited, which even though some of it was discriminatory and misogynistic, it still represented a strong step forward for feminism, owning our bodies and our stories and dictating when, how and, if to share it freely. Through all that discourse I realized that the release of my book is timely, and hopefully, would be embraced as such. In time.
I'm hoping the few readers of the Blog will join me on this journey to have my words compiled into a book and read publicly. This is bigger than a Blog, few hits at a time, making zero dollars from the blog.
This is more personal and I am MORE invested in this, in my words.
It is of course as noted above, very MATURE CONTENT.
I know it may not be the most intellectual of writings and is not critically acclaimed author work, but if y'all could enjoy #365dni then my book should be a breeze.
I'm super excited and proud of myself through it all.
I finally got my act together and did something.
You can find it here:
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