My Writing Journey,loool!

As a little girl I knew a lot of big words. I knew them because I read stories that were way beyond my years. The novels I read were written by James Hadley Chase, Agatha Christie and the likes of them. So when I began to write, I wrote exactly the same things I read about. I wrote about diehard criminals and impeccable policemen. And used words like boulevard even though it was hard to imagine what that looked like.
My exclamations would come in form of "for the love of mike", "for pete's sake", and so on. I wrote that my characters patronized grocery stores and waited for the pizza man to deliver their orders while they lay down on settees. It didn't matter that I wasn't even sure what a settee was or that in Nigeria our grocery stores were called supermarkets and then, I was just eight and though I lived in one of the fast-growing urban areas, pizza  delivery was not yet quite common. Yet I wrote anyways. I would often write, imitating James Hadley Chase, almost rewriting his last book I had read.

I find it really strange now because even I couldn't relate with what I wrote. But that sort of writing did something to me. It gave me a part of America. So that by the time I was ten I could confidently say that,  Chicago was the biggest city in Illinois and that if an American had lots of money he invested part of it in precious stones.  I read very few Nigerian novels. And when I eventually started reading more of them, some didn't really make much sense. I remember thinking that Wole Soyinka's The Lion and The Jewel had too much grammar. I found myself using the dictionary while I read the book. It felt like study to me. I also found myself incapable of copying Soyinka because my tender mind could not come up with words like ignoble and ignoramus on its own.

I got my first paradigm shift when I was twelve years old. One of my English Literature books was Echoes of Hard Times, a book of short plays.


To be continued in the next post!

Manipulators Alert!

Oh mehn! This post has been a long time coming... so I hope it's worth your read!

Beware Soul Brother... of Manipulators
We could start by defining who a manipulator is... or not. Because more often than not, these people are hard to pin down with a particular definition. They come in all shades. Repeat after me, all shades! But we could try, so for the best part a manipulator is a person who tries to use other people for their own personal and selfish gain. For the worst part, a manipulator tries to influence you in a devious way. A manipulator is smooth and hard to spot. But we have discovered a few of their schemes so here they are:

1. They often seek out relevant persons:
Manips as they would be called for the sake of this post... Lool! are always on the look out for the relevant people of any sphere, then they stick with them. If you find them in any organizations or groups, they often go the extra miles to make friends with the CEO,s MD's and the heads generally.

2. They enter your space and then enter you!
Once they get close enough to you, they tell you how valuable you are
They do this to win your trust. They leave no room for doubt in your mind. They appear very genuine.

3. They often want to cut corners and earn more than they merit:
 This is the reason why they have to be friends with the cream of where ever they are. Manips appreciate that they are not quite competent so they try to make up for their incompetence by hobnobbing.

4. They tell you stuff about people, then tell you stuff "people" said about you:
The first is just who they are. They want to paint everybody else black before you. The second is their way of telling you how exactly they feel about you, that part is very important! Because they'd never mention names. And even when they do, they'd make you promise not to tell.

5. They are pretty confident in their abilities to get what they want:
They know their worth as manipulators, either born or learned. They have been doing it and it works, most times.

6. They are hard to spot, cos they are smart and smooth:
So the first name coming to your head at this time is prolly not who you should be wary of!

So there! Beware of Manipulators and steer clear of them...
Catch ya!

My First Post

Hello World.