In the Acknowledgements section of Once Upon Our Childhood, I mention that my first draft was written when I was fourteen, but I don’t expatiate on why.
I had fallen in love with many of the books I read in the past decade, African Lit included, but something salient was missing that I only realize now in hindsight – I subconsciously kept searching for a representation, if not of me, then of the people, of the lives, of the stories, of the culture, of the environment around me. I couldn’t find any and so, I decided to create mine – yes, at fourteen. That was the birth of OUOC.
That first draft, I go on to say in my acknowledgments, has seen multiple iterations since then, becoming more refined and succinct as I haphazardly made way to my voice as they call it (look, I don’t pretend to be a professional writer. I just spill my mind onto paper and hope for the best, lol).
So yes, it has literally been 20 years in the making! Reading through the various versions recently was such a cringeworthy eye-opener – EYE have changed! The core of the characters hasn’t but good God, I’d like to believe that I’ve done a much better job telling their stories.
Anyway, it’s been forever since I blogged (or even contemplated writing another full-length book – I must be a sucker for pain given how much OUOC has stuck in my craw!) so I thought I’d try to crank the engine by listing out a couple things, including fun facts, about OUOC! Here we go:
- It is imperfect. Now, don’t go demanding a refund just yet (and if you’ve yet to pre-order, what on earth are you waiting for ???) but there is a reason why I’m releasing it myself as what I’ve deemed a pet project. To keep it simple, I wrote this story 20 years ago as I mentioned, and it is most likely not the story I’d write if I were to write one today. Scratch that, it is 100% not the story I’d write today. And I say that because who I am and what I write (or don’t write, thanks to a sustained writer’s block) has evolved (along with my identity) dramatically over the years. That said, I do believe it is an important story that should be shared and that is why I’ve chosen to still do so.
- As imperfect as it is, it is perfect for what it is – a meaningful story about four young female friends in what should be a familiar construct for my primary audience (more in next bullet), and I’ve done my very hardest to help the girls capture it as best as I can so it resonates. No seriously, this book has been edited at least 800M times and even with a pending release, it still could use some more work, but I’m done letting perfection be the enemy of great. I’ve reread it a zillion times (if I have to read it one mo’gin, I’ll howl in despair) and every time I get to the last line before the epilogue, I feel a ZING of emotion like girl, you really did try to do the damn thing! I listened and KILLED MY DARLINGS!
- It is MY unapologetic representation of the contemporary female Nigerian experience. I have to caveat with the ‘my’ because mine isn’t the only or necessarily accurate representation. I’d initially queried an earlier version with several literary gents back in 2010ish and gotten a couple of requests for partials and fulls. Some of the feedback was apt and I did incorporate into later versions. But feedback aimed at streamlining the authenticity of the world I’d created for my characters and plot, I thoroughly discarded. Sorry, not sorry. Please refer again to the first paragraph of the post 😊
- The first version I ever considered publishing was completed during a pseudo-gap year in 2009, the title has never changed, and the cover art (both digital and print), created by the amazing Carmen Sutherland from Spark Creative, has been finalized since 2014 (I’ll share more on the inspiration in a future post)! So yes, this really has been a long time coming. My early readers were super enthusiastic, much more than I expected. I never would have even considered releasing this, if not for their earnest push. I’ll tell you, the love and care of others that has gone into this remains awe-inspiring and humbling – think time, money, referrals, you name it.
Finally, 3 fun facts 😊
- Three of the characters are named after my mother—two major characters and a minor one who makes a cameo at the end. Bonus points for anyone able to guess who, who and who! Ping me here or offline if you know me in real life 🙂
- I embedded bits of me in each character because what does a writer have if not ego?! Ha! I suspect it might have made it harder to tell some of the characters from the other, but I hope my final rounds of editing have helped to mitigate this as much as possible
- The very first version was written in my ONWARD BIG exercise book – ROTFL! If you aren’t Nigerian, please google it. I could be convinced to post snapshots for a fee after it’s been released 😊
I could go on and on…it’s only been TWENTY years after all!
Next post – cover art inspo.
L.
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels
Worlds via Words 