Tomi Adeyemi Brought my Writing Back from the Dead

My writing is back from the dead.

Obviously, I’m still here.

If you’ve read my blog before, you know I come and go.  I know the most successful bloggers post regularly, or more than once a week. As I’ve written A Word or More through the years, I’ve tried to bring the focus back to why we’re here:

writing.

Life gets in the way. I’m not online all the time. I push my children to go outside, and I’m an active educator. Just as I still want to become a successful author, I want my students to succeed in the classroom. My attention is often divided between family, teaching, and when time is left, writing.

But, one book and its author recently brought me, the writer, back to life. For a while, I was writing a lot more non-fiction. I had slipped from my fictional and Young Adult/ Middle Grades’ roots.

If you haven’t heard of Tomi Adeyemi , you need to sit up and pay attention.

I wish I had sat up and paid attention when her publishing company first published Children of Blood and Bone.

After a particularly difficult school year in my former school in which I experienced trauma, it took a long time for me to heal. It took me a long time to return to both the mom, teacher, and writer within.

I can wish Tomi Adeyemi’s writing came into my life earlier, but I think the book came at the right time.  Like Hunger Games, I wanted to read Children of Blood and Bone again. Thankfully, Children of Virtue and Vengeance has just been published.

I love Tomi Adeyemi’s world. I love how she wrote a fantasy YA novel as an allegory to what she calls the “modern black experience.”

Tomi Adeyemi even has writing advice on her blog, but I think what is most powerful about her as an author is how she encourages writers to write about something that matters.

There are times I want to work on my unfinished memoir about raising my child with autism.  But, Adeyemi and recent discussions of To Kill a Mockingbird caused me to take a second look at my novel, Sons of the Edisto. 

When I first started this blog, my son was a baby, and I was still writing stories, poems, and the novel, Sons of the Edisto. The fact is through Tomi’s writing and debates that I read with my English I class about To Kill a Mockingbird that the narrative is dated with two white male protagonists, but I can still use the basic premise of the story in an alternate world.

Tomi made me realize I could still write a story about a prejudicial and racist group that tried to keep every person in their place while a Senator ran for office.  Seeing her protagonists, I re-envisioned mine. While the story is based on a 1924 election and the fact my grandfather defied his father by burning all of his KKK robes and items, I had to show something different with characters who are overcoming prejudices.

Children of Blood and Bone helped me realize I could realign Sons of the Edisto into something different this time with a multiracial and varied gender cast in an alternate kind of world.

Adeyemi is younger than me, but she speaks as an experienced and wise writer. She advises to read in your genre and out of your genre to make yourself a better writer. While I’m always reading different kinds of books, it was Children of Blood and Bone that gave me a new vision of a book about three characters who try to overcome a dangerous political party who will at nothing to destroy those different than their vision of a perfect society; especially those who are given a special gift from the river.