Hey there! Yes you!
It's been a while and I know you've all missed me - just been busy with a new gig and trying to keep the lights on and be able to pay the mortgage. I promise I will return ever so often going forward to share my life and time in my online journal. Better late than never right - according to my Grandfather who raised me – I was born 2 weeks late, and I have been in a hurry to catch up every since!
Although my current occupation and my career for the last 16 years has been that of an Information Technology Manager and to which I am currently employed at the General Parts International – I relocated to Raleigh Durham from New York in 2006 with my former job as an IT Project Manager at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). I love IT however my passion has always been that of a storyteller.
My earliest recollection of wanting to be a storyteller was when I was 5 and I would spend summers in the country with my maternal Grandmother who had OCD and one day she saw me at a sawed-off tree stump imitating the pastor of our local church and delivering a sermon. She then made me a Gown and gave me one of her old bibles and marked off a section of the backyard as my church for me to conduct my services. Her real motives were to keep me out of the house so that I wouldn’t muddy her clean floors so this arrangement was a win-win for both of us.So every day I would stand at my tree stump in my flowing home-made pastor’s gown with my old Bible and deliver fiery sermons to members of my amused family, the other neighborhood kids or anyone else who was compelled to listen.
But a 5 year old quickly runs out of topics for a sermon and when I started to take creative license with certain well kept family secrets my preaching career prematurely ended. My Grandmother deduced that it was better to keep me safe in doors at the expense of her clean floors than have me slaughtered in the back yard by my other relatives.
I have always been in love with books as books have always fed the hunger I had for stories. When other kids were watching cartoons and had fantasies about being Superman, Batman, Space Ghost or would stand in front of the television set and shout out SHAZAM in the hopes of being transformed into Captain Marvel – I was busy trying to figure out what the REAL mystery was in a Hardy Boys novel.
Reading was a hobby my Grandmother would happily invest in as it shortened the lines that would snake around her house of neighbors who had one complaint after the other about me: “He told jimmy that leather was nothing more than compressed poison ivy with black coloring and that he should make a BELT out of it” – “he bit Peggy Sue on her bottom lip the Doctor gave her two stitches” – “he pinned ribbons on poor Marcus and told him he could be a kite if he jumped off the roof.” The complaints were endless and although the floors weren’t looking too sharp, the books kept the angry neighbors at bay which suited my Grandmother just fine.
Although I was so widely read by the time I was a pre-teen the interesting thing was I was only reading books about things that interested me. I had no knowledge or care about sports – the only games I played was Chess and for many years considered that my only physical activity.
Once I tried to branch out and play soccer and I even tried out for the school’s soccer team, but when I managed to score a goal – in my own team’s goal causing the other team to win much to the anger and bewilderment of my team-mates, it was clear that I had no business being on the football field and that where I belonged was in the Bleachers on the stands trying to finish “The Stand” by Stephen King.
With all hopes of athleticism dashed I then joined the Debating Team when I started High School.
I remember the Debating Team Instructor to be a fiery Nigerian by the name of Charles Enysimwa who believed in delivering canned speeches to us to recite. I didn’t agree with that brand of preparation mind you as I thought the entire notion of a Debating Club was to teach us to argue constructively and be able to rebut the arguments to opposing views. Anyway – the man wanted to write the speeches, so we let the man WRITE THE SPEECHES.
Our team did very well in the debating matches with the other schools at one match in particular (we were up against Holy Childhood High for Girls – we called them the Witches of Eastwick) as they were an all girls school located on East Twickenham) I remember one match I was in the middle of delivering my speech when someone had left the auditorium door open and a strong gust of wind swooped by the Lectern and took away my notes with it leaving me paralyzed and mortified. There was a moment of uneasy silence and I swear I heard a gasp from one of my teammates - I had only to thank my lucky stars that I had committed the speech to memory days before and so was able to continue while the school Photographer collected my speech from the floor, I remember pausing from my delivery to thank him – impressing the Judges and being awarded Best Speaker although our team lost the argument to the witches.
Shortly after I was 14 and had consumed everything that Sidney Sheldon had written, I decided to write my own novel on a Typewriter that my Grandmother and I bought in New Rochelle, that novel was followed by eight others – all unpublished of course as childhood and adulthood are two very distinct stages of one’s life. I became a Father when I was 22 and three years before I migrated permanently to the United States to live with my Father’s family.
Fatherhood gave me a new perspective in life and my writing became more of hobby in my pursuit to be a good husband and father and provide for my son. Which lead me down my current career path. Years later after the collapse of my marriage and my son becoming older and not needing me as much my thoughts have returned to my passion. I have started writing again and even rewriting some of my earlier novels and giving them a more mature finish.
My current manuscript is entitled “Final Man” and is set in the year 5,025 AD where mankind through inter-racial breeding is down to just one race on the planet and is ruled over by a female president (the best and the brightest) and is more evolved than all of earth’s citizens. Future life is scientific, environmentally-friendly and altruistic and money does not exist, ashamed of Earth’s history and past of wars, diseases, famine and racial and social inequality the history books have been rewritten to paint a life that has always been mired in the present. But archaeologists conducting routine excavation in the Alaska Mountains uncover the perfectly cryogenically frozen body of a man from the 21st century and he is still alive and escapes from the housing facility. The President wants the situation contained by him being caught and killed before he penetrates the society and shatter the lie that modern society is built on – what then enfolds is a battle for survival between the final man of the 21st century and the final evolution of mankind.
Yes, I intend to finish it and get it published.
