Dodo Au Go-Go

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 com...

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 te...

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 t...

Once upon a time - summer or winter, late lazy sunlight or freezing darkness - this was what used to greet me when I got home from work. I've forgotten that this used to be a daily thing. Score one hundred for those daily blogs or tweets or drawing pad or diary entries which itemise all the little things that would otherwise be lost forever. Because, one day and sooner than you might think, they become precious memories. To my Bodie-Boy, running joyful and free in his blue nebula, and to my Indi-Girl, who would follow me (almost) anywhere, I love you.

Belated Announcement: I have another blog! Well, it's a bit more than another blog. It's another blog on an actual, proper, website that I created. It's called reeimaginedworlds.com and it's my official publishing site for my Falling into the Five Senses Anthology. I'm slowly blogging on there, as well as here (trying to keep that New Year Resolution thing about blogging more regularly). The reeimaginedworlds.com blog is - obviously - for antho and any other book/project news. Dodo Au Go-Go is still my blog-about-anything-I-want space. I wrote a piece recently for reeimaginedworlds.com, but thought it applied quite nicely here too. So, I'm doubling up! (I won't do this too often - promise!) It's a reflection on my writing process for one of my fave stories in the anthology. Happy reading! :-) -------- It's subjective, I know. But my most favourite of all my five stories in the Falling into the Five Senses anthology is 'The Diamond ...

It's amazing how difficult I find some days to tweet something. Or even anything. It used to be easy to bash out something and send it flying into the tweetosphere. Try and say something witty or pithy (or try to not pith people off) and have an interesting convo or two. But now... now, I find myself staring at my feed, wondering what on earth to say that might be of interest to anyone. Sure, I could plug my antho. But people get annoyed (me included) if all you have to say for yourself is "buy-my-book-buy-my-book". These days, I keep checking my timeline with trepidation, worried that I'm just retweeting stuff rather than saying stuff. Yes, I'm retweeting stuff that's of interest to me, but they're still just retweets, rather than my own words. A timeline filled with retweets is something else that annoys me. I've previously snarkily moaned that people should use their own words on their timelines! And yet, what do I do when my own words seem to...

I was gifted a lovely new notebook for Christmas. It is beautiful and pristine and so exquisite I'm quite petrified of using it. But on the plus side, the new notebook has made me feel that it's ok to finally start using another beautiful notebook - the larger one with the carnelian stone was also a Christmas gift from a mere four years ago! Actually, four years ago, I received both of these lovely notebooks. And I'm proud to say I did use the littler one on the left straight away. It took me two years to fill up, but I used it with words I'm proud of. (One of the things that always happens with me and lovely new notebooks is that, despite my best intentions, the notebook invariably degenerates into a half-hearted and splotchy repository of half-baked ideas that are usually, earnestly over-plotted. The idea usually never goes anywhere, and I kill the notebook's mojo.) But that didn't happen with this notebook. I filled it with, of all things, my ...