Today It's Us, Tomorrow It's You: Maandamano Edition

 

Today It's Us, Tomorrow It's You: Maandamano Edition by Annemarie Musawale

Don't You Just Love the Smell of Teargas in the Morning?

Read on Substack

Beware the Ides of March Madness

Being a writer is  hard, right? We all know this. It's not the writing that's difficult - at least not for me. It's all the other shit that goes into it like publishing, marketing, getting repeat readers, all that good stuff.

I'm not good at it. It requires me to be social which ugh.

But I am good at the making of content portion. I just wish y'all could find it on your own. Since you won't...

1. Let's talk about erotica. 

    Do you know how hard it is to market that shit? Everyone reads it but nobody wants to cop to reading it. So they won't join your mailing lists or want to be advertised to. 

It's a pain in the ass I tell you. 

So I took down my erotica books (aside from the collection) and transferred the stories to Ream. You can read them there, at your leisure, just as long as you subscribe. I promise never to send you any mail or look at your names...unless you tell me you want updates.

I'm currently writing a very unhinged mafia paranormal postapocalyptic gay romance there. It's fun. I update weekly. That's in addition to all my other erotica tales which are now on there. Bonus, I will be adding a new every month. Personally I think the subscription fee is a steal. 

Go see for yourself. 

I think this will be a good home for them. 

2. New Podcast Episode

As you can see from the links on the side of this blog, there's a new podcast episode about suicide. You should listen to it if only to see whether you relate or not. I think you will. I surprised myself by doing so. It gets rather philosophical in places so I hope you bear with us. 

3. New Harlequin

I told you about the romance that I'm writing didn't I? The man is Palestinian and I'm a bit worried that Harlequin will reject it on that premise alone. I know we all like to pretend that Palestinians are the villains. We'll see how it goes.

It's nice to be writing something new again. Marcus Devereux has kind of stalled as I try to get over my intimidation of my own writing. 

That girl who wrote the first ten chapters was on a roll. 

She was cooking. 

She ate down.
I don't know if I can match her level of badassery. You're supposed to look back on your writing and cringe (at least according to so-called writers on twitter) but me I look back on my writing and I'm like whoa girl! slow down.

Self belief has never been my problem.

Anyway I got work to do. I have provided you with news, so click on link, click follow, enjoy the content.

Holiday Seasoning

 I'm without work for the next week or so and I'm just taking the time to rest, reset and rejuvenate. Weirdly enough, I've gotten some shit done that I haven't been able to do due to just mental exhaustion. I'm having a time.

My son cooked us Christmas dinner that was outstanding.

Just outstanding.  

 So much food, for just the two of us followed by a camera copy of Gladiator II in Spanish. The subtitles were so wonky we couldn't really understand in any words but we still understood the story. 

Still going to watch it in English though.

 So then I did some painting, submitted ten chapters of a new story to a publisher, and I will be recording a new podcast episode tomorrow. I don't feel sick all the time...it's great.

the painting I made

Anyway, so I'm sitting here, writing my own shit again, watching the most random romance movie on Netflix and it's just a lot deeper than I was expecting. For one thing, the guy's mother is dying and she had a memorial for herself while still alive. Very triggering for me, but also inspiring. If I die of a terminal illness, I'd also love to have a living memorial before I die. But I know I'd get a lot of superstitious push-back about it.

If you're going to say nice things about me, I'd like to be alive to hear them.

Been thinking a lot about dying lately. 

It was always something to be feared. That phone call that changes your life forever. Something to be avoided at all costs...but the way the world is moving these days, what's to stay alive for? (and I say this in a very non-suicidal way).  

With climate change, disease, the rise of fascism, Ruto, no future for our children...there just doesn't seem to be much to look forward to.

But.

I am enjoying watching these two people fall in love in a very wholesome, real way. No cheese. I'm looking forward to reading several books I bought over this holiday time. I do hope they're really good. I am loving the new romance novel I'm writing. She's a Bajan, he's Palestinian and there's a good chance Harlequin will reject it for political reasons but it's a really good book. 

interim book cover for my second chance romance

 The movie is called Love At First Sight by the way. It's on Netflix. Watch it.

I've been kicked off twitter, which I think is the second thing that's enabled me to do all these other things. I spent too much time doom scrolling. Twitter did me a favor. Though they kicked me out for some bullshit reason. I was apparently an inauthentic account, spreading untrue things. 

I can only imagine that the eye of Sauron spotted one of my tweets on Post Election Violence and had them kick me out. That's the only thing I can think of because otherwise they kicked me out for telling people I took the last fudge at Carrefour. 

Whatever. 

It's for the best I guess. 

 

Whatever has caused this change, whether it's waking up at 3pm every day, or maybe its the hibiscus blend I've been drinking, maybe, its the fact that my son won a lucrative contract and I have work for at least the next two months. Maybe it's because I'm doing things new, things different, things I've been meaning to do for a while but just didn't have the energy for.

After this, I might update one of my fanfics! I know some people who will be very happy about that. 

Keep an ear out for that podcast. It'll be beneficial to you if you've ever thought about how the hell to pay a hospital bill.

Stories from Twitter

I have to put my phone in a drawer sometimes because I am easily distracted. I write two lines of work and then I get some notification or decide to check if I have mail or just see if there's a follow-up tweet to some mess on Twitter...I asked myself why I am so much slower now than I used to be at finishing assignments and I realized that it's my phone.
A few years ago, I used to check twitter in the morning when I woke up and then that was it for the day. Now it's like every five minutes.
Ugh.
I need help.

That said, a lot of interesting things happen on Twitter. Why just yesterday, I saw this post a girl had written telling "Hannah from nursing school" to dump her boyfriend because he was boasting about cheating on her with multiple women, since he came to somewhere called Baylor.
Well, not too long after that, "Hannah" retweeted the tweet with a comment, "Update, I dumped him."
Now that is a fully fledged story waiting to be written.
Who is the good samaritan snitch and how did she overhear this conversation?
In my headcanon, Cheater Boyfriend and his friends are sitting in a coffee house. Talking really loudly, being all obnoxious the way boys in groups tend to be. Twitter Snitch is a waitress at the cafe and she happens to be serving them. They've gone all toxic masculinity on her more than once, commenting on the size of her boobs and one of them even slapped her ass. Furthermore, they didn't even leave a tip.
So she's like, "Okay den."
Cheater guy probably didn't even sleep with as many chicks as he claimed. Boys lie, especially to their lil' friends. All exaggerating how much p*ssy they get...it's sad.
And then Hannah read the tweet and part of her wasn't even surprised because she knows deep down that her boyfriend is an asshole. She's maybe been looking for an excuse to dump him and concentrate on her studies. and look at God, answering her prayers...

Speaking of "God" there was another tweet which just made me laugh out loud. News outlets were reporting that Mike Pence seems to think that God is calling him to be a president in waiting. Now just an aside, if he was any other color than white and said that shit they'd have him on psychiatric hold so fast...hearing voices and shit.

Anyways, so an account named "God" retweets one of the news outlets with the comment, "It was a prank call."

He he he...

No?

Tough crowd.

On a more serious note, Africa but mostly East Africa, but mostly Kenya and Uganda have been trying to get musician turned politician, Bobi Wine out of jail. He was arrested I think for winning an election; I'm not sure exactly. Something about stones and cars. I'm old enough to remember when M7 (president of Uganda) overthrew Obote (I think - former president of Uganda) in a coup. And it occurs to me that Uganda has never had a transfer of power that wasn't by a coup. 

It's 2018 and here we still are. 

Anyway, thanks to the noise made on Twitter, M7 had Bobi released on bail. The man could barely walk. He was on crutches and went straight to the hospital. 

Better M7 though because he doesn't pretend to be anything other than what he is. Meanwhile Muigai, Trump, Duterte, Putin...all cut from the same cloth but people still want to pull the wool over their own eyes and make excuses for their evil.

On a happier note, it was Michael Jackson's sixtieth (60!) birthday on August 29th and some idle twitter user decided to reimagine the Thriller video as Ola Ray going on a real date with 'werewolf guy.'

Hilarity ensued.

I wish I could post it all here but I can't. Just take it from me, it was quite hilarious. 

Happy Birthday, Michael!

Do you feel like sometimes we insist on pedestalizing some people to the extent that it isn't even the real person anymore and whatever we heard that they did, there's just this internal shrug and then the allegation is dismissed like it didn't even exist? I feel that way sometimes about people like Michael. Especially with this accusation about Asia Argento sexually abusing a seventeen-year-old boy. Many times the abused becomes an abuser. It's true for Asia and it's probably true for Michael as well. But no matter how many accusations were leveled against him, Michael still remains Michael. It's weird how the mind works. I think it's the same with Trump supporters, he's their god and nothing he does will change that. It also works with God too right? Sometimes you can be mad as fuck at him but still worship him. 

Nuance.

Have a very self-aware weekend.