‘Her name was Wanjiru. But she liked better her Christian one, Beatrice. It sounded more pure and more beautiful.
Not that she was ugly; but she could not be called beautiful either. Her body, dark and full fleshed, had the form, yes, but it was as if it waited to be filled by the spirit.
She worked in beer halls where sons of women came to drown their inner lives in beer cans and froth. Nobody seemed to notice her. Except, perhaps, when a proprietor or an impatient customer called out her name, Beatrice; then other customers would raise their heads briefly, a few seconds, as if to behold the bearer of such a beautiful name, but not finding anybody there, they would resume their drinking, their ribald jokes, their laughter and play with the other serving girls.
She was like a wounded bird in flight: a forced landing now and then but nevertheless wobbling from place to place so that she would variously be found in Alaska, Paradise, The Modern, Thome and other beer-halls all over Limuru.
Sometimes it was because an irate proprietor found she was not attracting enough customers; he would sack her without notice and without a salary. She would wobble to the next bar.
But sometimes she was simply tired of nesting in one place, a daily witness of familiar scenes; girls even more decidedly ugly than she were fought over by numerous claimants at closing hours.’
From the short story ‘Minutes of glory’ by Ngugi wa Thiongo
This is a rather vulnerable post.
It contains a sample of my old writing that I found in a box in a big mix of papers.
Back in the day I used to print everything out as well as save it on hard drives.
I’ve misplaced the hard drives. But I did find this old box. Full of mismatched printed papers of many, many different writing projects.
I took photos of two random pages and ran them through AI to have it copy the text.
Now I’m going to copy paste the text here. On my blog.
And then I’ll live in silent agony over the fact that anyone anywhere that discovers my blog can read it.
After I agonize over it I’ll start to deal with it. Maybe even process it and get used to it.
But the point of putting my old writing on here is to number one: to acclimate to the discomfort of sharing my incredibly flawed fiction.
Number two: to document where I started so I can later track how I progressed.
And number three: to allow feedback.
I would like to someday make some money from writing. Because not only does it lend confidence to earn actual money, it makes writing a true resource for me.
Right now writing is, I suppose, a spiritual resource of sorts.
I enjoy it. It helps me think and problem solve.
Which is all fantastic.
But having writing be a real resource in practical terms would be an extra layer of satisfaction and it would simplify my life.
There are several avenues I can try to earn money at writing.
Which to pursue and give attention to is the very difficult part.
This blog allows me to post whatever I feel like posting and just see what happens to it out in the real world. If it gets entirely ignored or if it gets reactions.
It also gives me reactions from myself. Because rather than endlessly leaving things formless where they ‘still need editing’ I’m just putting it out there. Letting it be what it is.
I stop thinking of everything as a work in progress. I stop tinkering and I just start doing and just letting things go.
Things are impossible to predict. It’s best to take as much action as possible and do as little thinking as possible.
I chose this at random and I didn’t alter anything.
It is from a book I attempted to write that I titled ‘Simon’s theory’.
It was one of my favorite projects. I lasted a long time on it.
I think it had a word count close to one hundred thousand. For context the first Harry Potter book was around eighty thousand words.
But even with its word count it never got even close to being finished.
It turned into a big blob of chaotic nonsense.
It went off on a million different nonsensical tangents that make it mostly unreadable.
I can’t remember when I wrote it.
I only know it was when I lived in LA and before I did Mektoub.
So somewhere between 19 and 24.
It was a very strange book.
A sort of comedy but mostly a horror about an apocalypse that had to do with almost half the population suddenly developing the need to eat other humans or they would painfully decompose without dying,
The main dilemma being that it was impossible to tell the difference between them and regular people.
So the world becomes hell.
Then a mysterious group comes along and offers a select number of regular people a way to a ‘utopia’. Where they will be safe from all the chaos and hell the world has become but spots are limited and must be competed for.
So people essentially compete for a spot in a ‘heaven’ of sorts. The comedy of it was how the characters had to compete. It was very campy and silly.
Yet there was also a lot of dark mystery and terror behind what heaven really was.
I remember it got very trippy and even I had no idea where I was going with it. Which was why it was so fun.
Most of what I wrote is missing. Possibly for forever. It could be buried somewhere in a hard-drive that’s buried in a box somewhere in my garage.
Otherwise all I have is a mismatch of what I printed out.
Some of the pages were eaten by something.
Like the paper itself had nudged him to get his attention. His eyes drifted towards it but he shook himself and set it aside. Getting up to warm his coffee and return to the book that had been left forgotten on the little side table at the creatures arrival.
The words of the book only touched the surface of his mind and the coffee lost a bit of its magic.
The flier mulled around, flashing over the words, the tie-dyed color of it sprayed over letters, the words faded over and became the words he’d read on that flier.
He let his eyes turn away from the words on the book and glance at that flier. Despite the deep creases in it from being tightly folded, it stayed perfectly open, displaying every single word not even the shadow of a crease touching a single letter.
He found himself reading those words yet again and again and just once more. Even though he understood them, they didn’t quite settle in his mind. There was nothing confusing about those words, they were perfectly clear, hard to comprehend in the sheer bizarreness of them, yet succinct, uncomplicated and short.
He tried to set it aside yet again and return to his coffee. But the coffee muddled in his own vivi imagery of those words and those neon colors.
And the business of this train. A train that one could find simply by looking
It didn’t take him much longer to exit the coffee shop. And look for a train that one simply had to look for to find
At first he stepped out and half expecting to see it pull up right in front of him. A spectacular train, those luxuries old fashioned quarters as trains should be. It didn’t arrive. Though the wind blew a bit harder at the thought, slightly eerily as though it was in fact answering him.
He pulled his coat tighter around himself and was just about to feel ridiculous when he heard it on the wind. A slight whistle, though too deep for that. A broken vibrating sound scattered at the edge of a harsh wind. Unable to now stop the thought, he listened harder for it.
Something louder dragged at the edge of the wind. Like in the distance every deep note on an organ had been hit.
With just a bit of added intent he listened and heard it yet again. A low blaring note carried towards him and then swept away.
The sound moved him forward, only a step. He was immediately greeted by sounds yet again, As subtle and far away as it was, it was unmistakable. The chugging of grinding metal and the hiss of steam.
His feet fell in front of him in a brisk walk, that chugging and steam staying consistent and louder with each step he took. Then it came, one loud, long blaring of a train horn.
The sound ignited him into a run, as though he knew exactly where that train was and was about to miss it.
The sounds continued on in the distance, growing louder and more real with his every stride. The feeling of the unnatural with every blare, though unnatural wasn’t quite the word. It suggested something off, strange or eerie. It was far from eerie, only at its very edges, the very slight anxiety at the heels of pure excitement. The true word to describe it made Timothy feel childish, for it was magical. The kind of magic a growing child might be losing faith in then suddenly discover has a chance to exist and he ran towards it with that same gusto. Like a child trying to catch Santa before he could dash up the chimney,
He tore down dark streets barely seeing them, only following sound as if sight was not necessary.
Down gray and stone stair cases, into dark windy tunnels until he found the end of the road and discovered his surroundings.
The magic faded. Quite as abruptly and painfully as a child seeing evidence of magic being fantasy.
He was in the subway. There was nothing magical about it. It was putridly, coldly and mercilessly reality without magic. Just stone, the wind gusting through the tunnel and the smell of grime.
Though he wasn’t left to feel much disappointment. His head jetted to the building echo of the long, single blare that sounded from the dark tunnel. The chugging of grinding metal now so loud, the edges of it hit unpleasant high notes as it began to screech over unmistakable braking, the rolling steam layering over all of it.
One last loud blare of the horn that left the chugging and the hissing at the very edge and there it was. A train screeching to halt right in front of Timothy, right there in that grimy subway.
There was nothing unmagical about it. It was entirely magical. Not the kind of magic that made one think of fairies or wizards. But the kind of magic that came from the real life version being able to exceed imagination.
It was everything one would imagine of a train, everything one should image of a train. The perfect transport to somewhere very far away. It inspired those feelings of adventure and wonder and brought them right out of hopeful fantasy into reality. The kind of train that made the journey as exciting as the destination.
Red, brass and black, a slight gleam of the red that made it look new, yet a grime and rust over the metal that made it look traveled. Like it been places and seen things he could only dream off.
Thin lines of gold outlining the black, so thin one to look and study for details to see them. The shine of the gold faded and smudged in such a way that it looked from its very roots, like thin hints of gold bleeding from rock. Every detail of the train inspired adventure and the unknown yet trimmed it in luxury.
The stream of it gave one last hiss and just a couple more clicks of the metal as it came to a full stop. Out he stepped, as he should. A man in a pretty coat with a row of gold buttons down it and a gold lined conductor’s cap.
“All aboard!”
Timothy glanced around the subway. It was no more than empty gray stone, he was the only waiting for the train.
He did a few little turns around on the spot in his confusion before wandering up to that conductor with the bow footedness of new born foal.
“Um, pardon me sir,”
“Yep.” Said the conductor, with a slight tip of his hat though no acknowledgement from his eyes.
“Where’s this train going? Exactly.” He finished.
“Everybody gets out at Utopia. If you’re going farther you’ll need a ticket.”
Jess lanai 