11th and 12th (a.k.a Days 4 and 5 ) – Life! Our baby is born! #BookSprint

11th.

Today was really busy. I think we’d also started getting tired of being cooped up in the house – I know I was! The food was still crap (it was substandard everyday to be honest), creating perfect characters was tiring, and I missed my nephew terribly! Plus, Pearl and I were now firmly in the grip of the evil flu, and I think Rafeeat was starting to sniff a bit as well. Or was it Kalu?

This book must be completed! Men at work…

Writing collaboratively also meant loving and leaving your characters, and I remember Elnathan and I had a bit of thing because I felt like his editing of my character was a bit too much. To be honest, I think writing with others is a humbling experience, and one that I’ve learned to approach with an open mind for a million reasons, chief of which is the fact that no one has the monopoly of knowledge. No one.

On the bright side, Pastor Ekwueme and Madam Oluoma were born today (they are characters in the book), and am I proud of them or what?!

Evening… We worked till 9pm everyday. Started at 9am after breakfast, then a break for lunch, dinner, maybe half an hour personal time in the evenings, and then it’d be back to writing, writing, writing!

We bonded just a bit more – just a bit more. Sometime before I slept, it occurred to me that 12th was the end of the sprint, and I knew I’d miss everyone. Really  miss them. I also worried about the bits that hadn’t been sorted – title of the book, cohesion of all the stories, graphics, those kinds of things.

We’ll see.

 

12th.

Race against time, book should be published today! And another character was born this morning, the ineffable Bonaventure! I’m sure I don’t have any friends in real life called that; I like and get amused by the name!

I snapped at one (maybe two) people today, really felt ashamed afterwards. Not in my defense or anything, but by this morning I was unofficially ending a 2nd week with the flu, and the constant throbbing in my head was driving me mad. So, I admit I was short with a few people, and this here is an apology!! Please forgive me, I don’t know what to do, please forgive me, I can’t stop loving you! Who sang that song again?

By evening, we agreed on a title, how we wanted to be presented in the book, we agreed on a cover, and after we’d been back and forth with our designer a bit, our baby was ready to be born! Did you know Nigeria had a ‘national bird’? Incredible, but we do!

On the left you can see the different options for a cover…

5 days of blood, sweat, and tears, and we had a book! Whoop! Turn up!

Talk about joy and rejoicing, grooving our hearts and stress away at XO (thank you Oche for being such a wonderful host), and that 4am shawarma! I kind of understood what people say about the sight of a baby erasing all the labor pains – with this experience I can so relate!

And so I give to you, our baby, NAMELESS!!

Yes!!! Finally!

Don’t think we could rejoice enough… we did this pose like 3000 times!

One more for the road, yes please! Big shout out again to Louis for all the photos! Can’t wait to see the full documentary!

 

Available for download here – https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2xrIM4Ua2qaX0xHM2FtRENVSlU/preview and printed copies available (for free) on request.

Massive thank you to Christine, Ghida, and the entire team at Heinrich Boll for the opportunity…how about a book tour next year? Lights, cameras, red carpets and things? Yes please!!