Dodo Au Go-Go

Sometimes I look out for out-of-the-ordinary stuff on YouTube to entertain my Little One. You know. for when the standard screen distractions lose their appeal, and you need something attention-catching so you can just get a quick break, gulp down the remains of that cold cup of tea, make that much-needed dash to the bathroom, or drag the laundry out of the hysterically-beeping washing machine.
For such moments, I do what anyone with a childhood in Mauritius--with all its French, English, Hindi and other pop culture influences, plus the ad hoc, scattered connections to the those influences that someone who migrated to Australia in their pre-internet, tweeny years--would do. I scanned YouTube for French cartoons and Bollywood songs, starting the ones I could remember from my long-ago childhood. I hoped YouTube's recommendations would find other good ones. 
After some detours--in retrospect, it was probably not wise to jump between French cartoons and Bollywood classics--YouTube event…

Dodo Au Go-Go is suddenly looking a bit different. After many years of plain white, adorned only with a couple of quirky fonts, a bit of a sea breeze has just come through.
The reason for this breeze at this particular time is a bit convoluted but amusing to me, so I'm jotting it down here.
In the spirit of doing everything backwards (what the Aussies would call "arts-end up" - except they wouldn't say 'arts', but you get my drift), now that the Falling into the Five Senses anthology is out, I've been trying to wrap my head about marketing for indie (independent/self-published/self-pubbed) writers. Helpful advice on Twitter from the forever-wonderful Sarah Brentyn pointed me towards the idea that a cohesive identity/brand across platforms is one of the helpful things you can do to make yourself more recognisable. 
This was a kind of first-step marketing task I could cope with. And so I started thinking about making the look of this Dodo blog more connected t…

It's 4am. A Wednesday in May. I'm at the bottom of the garden. My Little One is in my arms. Indi-Girl, our stumpy-tailed cattle dog, is roaming around, her blue-grey fur rendering her invisible in the dark.

I've been awake since 2am, when Little One woke up in a tempest. Normally, the wake-up routine has two options: soothe and re-settle, and soothe, wake up for a couple of hours, then re-settle. The tempestuous wake-up, where no-one can even touch LO, is a new thing. There are squalls, fury, distress, frustration all wrapped up in the disorientating wake-up of night. The tempests haven't happened too often and I hope they stay that way.

Our attempted re-settle at 4am is interrupted by Indi-Girl suddenly coming to sit at the child-proof gate and speaking to us in anxious grumbles. I sigh and mutter and grumble about the timing - two hours after wake-up is the ideal time to re-settle LO. But there you have it. C'est la vie, and all that. The universe either has a diff…

The lovely Nillu Nasser invited me onto her blog for a cuppa and a chat. Thanks again, Nillu, for this wonderful opportunity to catch up!

The original interview is here on Nillu's blog. Have a visit and check out her books and some of her other inspiring writings while you're there.



In the Armchair: Reena Dobson April 11, 2020

I have someone special to introduce to you for today’s instalment of In the Armchair. Reena and I have been online friends for a few years. I came to know her mostly through the brilliant short fiction she shares on Twitter. She’s one of those people whose timeline is filled with honesty and beauty. Twitter can be a mysterious land. It’s a treat to have Reena in the armchair here on the blog, so we can get to know her better. She’s here to talk about her anthology Falling into the Five Senses, co-authored with Maria Carvalho, Cedrix E. Clarke and Roger Jackson, who are all part of Twitter’s microfiction community. It’s a fantastic writing team. Over t…

I woke up at 4.43am. It's getting to be a regular pattern these days, with Little One and all. I could go back to sleep, and sometimes I do. And other times, I check the time on my phone - and a torrent of world stuff rushes in, too seething, jumbled and anxiety-inducing to ignore. On those days, sleep slips out of reach. It washes away in the flood of stuff, or just retreats into the night."Sommeil casse" as they say in Mauritius. "My sleep broke". It sounds more lyrical in Kreol/French. Like tiny pieces of sleep crumbling and breaking away until you reach a state of wakefulness. 
I head towards the kitchen. A lizard laughs, languid. Indi-Girl, my beloved woofer, stirs and gives me the once-over, and goes back to sleep. I like to think she's checking to make sure I'm ok. She could just as easily be checking to see why I'm disturbing her sleep. But I'll take my interpretation with a single-shoulder shrug and a smile. 

I make a cup of tea. Through…

Over on Twitter, I'm playing along to a daily March indie-writer celebration, called #MarchOfTheWriters, initiated by the very awesome JD Estrada.

The Day 7 prompt was #HomeIs

So. I'm a migrant. I'm a member of a diaspora (probably more than one). If anyone asks, I claim a formal hyphenated identity that includes three places and two hyphens. Roots and routes have been a feature of my life journey, and of the stories I tell about myself. All these things have been part of the reason I wrote a doctoral thesis over an excrutiatingly long period of time (and the doctorate is also the reason I've developed an overly complicated relationship to writing, but that's another post for another time). In short, I've thought about the idea of 'Home' a lot.

I was born in Country A. I left there as a toddler and haven't been back, though I still claim citizenship there. It's not home, but it's my father's home, and my parents' stories come togethe…