What if I faked my own death?
The thought did cross my mind briefly.
But I couldn’t.
Death was not something I toyed around with.
No, I’m not scared of death. After all, no one would leave this world alive. But I had experienced it way too often to toy with it.
In 20 years, I had lost my father (1999), my elder sister (2012) and my immediate younger sister (2019). Faking it, and my mother hearing it, might be fatal.
During the lock-down proper that we all had to spend most days indoors, I began to think of how best to maximize time. So I started to read the Bible, specifically, the Book of Proverbs. After reading chapter 1, I rewrote the chapter as a story that buttressed the core principles therein. The idea and the execution came easily and quickly.
The next day, I read chapter 2, and again I rewrote the chapter as a story that buttressed the core principles therein.
In less than three weeks, I had written 15 stories based on the first 15 chapters of the Book of Proverbs.
“Kai, when you broke, ideas go dey drag for attention inside your head.”
Anyway, I edited it, and also used Grammarly for editing. Voila! I had an E-book ready to sell.
At this point, you are probably expecting a fairy tale spin to it, that I sold 1 million copies. Me sef was expecting the same thing o.
After an initial flurry of family and friends paying for some copies, things slowed down.
So I picked up the Bible again and wrote about (The Untold Story of) Uriah the Hittite. I wrote it like I would like to see it in a movie.
After that, I delved into an aspect of writing I had never fully done before, fictional storytelling. And voila! Two books were birthed – The Way of the Lion and Smoking Guns & Bleeding Streets.
How do you sell books of fiction when people are losing jobs and businesses are crashing?
I don’t know too. I’m just a writer, so I write.
But I have this dream that someone would come buy the rights to the books and turn them into movies.
“Baba God, if you are reading this, please treat as urgent!!!”
