Monday, April 7, 2014

Whatzup???

I'm back home and settled after Time of the Writer. It seems to get longer and longer for me to get back into my routine after travelling, but I am back to work, and that's good. I always thought of myself as someone who was not necessarily born to write, I'm a generalist by nature. I finally got to get back to proper writing (not columns or blogs or Facebook or emails) last week and I couldn't believe how great I felt. So perhaps I'm changing, perhaps I'm becoming one of those people who must write to feel okay. That's an interesting turn of events...

So what's going on?? If Not for This, my book about a couple caught up in the Herero genocide in 1904, has had some positive feedback. May we all cross fingers that this book gets a nod and finds a fabulous publisher???? Thanks!

What else? I have a new story up at FunDza. It's a romance called Missing Chances. If you'd like to read it you can find it HERE. The readers there seem to be enjoying it. It is such fun getting immediate feedback like that!

My romance novella, There's Something About Him, has just been accepted by the Nigerian publisher, Kachifo. It will be included in their new imprint for popular fiction called Farafina Breeze. I'm very excited about this for a few reasons. One, it's the publisher that publishes Chimamanda Adichie's books in Nigeria (Yay!!!) . The other thing is that I've had a plan at the back of my mind that the best way to get our books distributed around the continent (for us published on the continent) is to find a publisher in each area, i.e. Southern Africa, East Africa, and West Africa. I would love to have a network of publishers on the continent to which I could routinely submit my manuscripts. I'm crossing fingers this may be the beginning.

My young adult novel set in USA during the bicentennial year is currently "cooking". When I was in Durban I was explaining to the kids how I use all sorts of scientific-y words for my process such as "cooking", "fiction pressure" and "growing legs" but they shouldn't go off thinking that they mean anything to anyone else. HA! Cooking is when the story must sit until you nearly forget you wrote it. That's what's happening now with Bicentennial Summer.

I have a story coming out in Drum Magazine this Thursday (10th April) called Pelo's Call for Help. A ghost story--Boooooo!

That's about it. I'm trying to keep myself in the office at the moment instead of sneaking in the house to watch the Oscar Pistorious trial- it is very addicting!

3 comments:

Joyful said...

You are so busy. I think you must make excellent use of your time. Take care!

Vanessa Gebbie said...

a whirlwind! Congrats on such a wonderful journey. x

Lauri said...

Thanks guys. In actual fact Joyful, I'm a terrible procrastinator sometimes. I'm just lucky to have a lot of time.