Why I write and The Man who Slept with the Devil
I once tweeted that I wrote to shock and delight and distract myself from Newcastle United’s plight. That was not quite the whole truth. I usually start writing a story out of a sense of outrage. “Deadly Conception” came in response to the rise of xenophobia. Many of the sentiments expressed by the fictional protagonists emerged during the Brexit debates; and as in the book Britain had lost its credit rating. I based The Pregnant Mule around a murder in a corrupt NHS of the future.
The Line in the Sand started off as a tribute to people I knew or worked with and many of them appear in the book, but inspiration originally came from the film “the life of others” about life under the Stasi in East Germany. Then it changed into a book about one of the Soviet interrogators during the Doctors’ Plot trial in Stalin’s Russia but before I knew it I was writing about a little boy separated from his family in West Africa. A year into the project I decided to change the protagonist to a little girl. Dele. Why? As a challenge and to address some of the themes close to my heart -injustice, Africa’s plight, the use and abuse of power and the concept of justice and revenge. And powerless writers can still have fun while they toil. I called one of the villains Niputi. He was hanged for killing a revered parrot called Ukraini. Get it?
The story I am writing now, The Man who slept with the Devil, is about a man who finds himself in a terrible marriage he cannot escape because he is being blackmailed by his in-laws. Yet he wants to get out before he has a child! I think its main themes will include love, destiny and fate, self-knowledge. Whether the book stays on that track I wait to see. So don’t hold me to it. Meanwhile, if you want to stretch your imagination by reading about revenge by a profane parrot on an imaginary island in West Africa The Line in the Sand is the book for you.
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