myne (4)

My experience of reading for pleasure

12166310293?profile=originalMy first novel, A Heart to Mend, was published in 2009, and with the positive reviews came the interviewers. My second, A Love Rekindled, out in March 2011 has also started getting some attention, and one of the more common question remains, “When did you start writing?”

The easy answer is that I started writing as a child but what I think is more important is when I started reading. Without that, I might not be a writer today, much less an author. I could stop writing today, in fact I did stop writing at some periods in my life, but I doubt I could stop reading.

Yes, I am a writer and author today but first, I was a reader.

I have to confess that for me there’s just something about books and the written word as a means to take me outside myself while still remaining very personal. The writer takes me to a new place, either physically or emotionally and plumbs my depths. I was a quiet child and even when surrounded by my siblings and other people, I would often find myself lost in my own thoughts. I loved daydreaming and the books I read were like the epitome of this fantasizing. It’s like an imagination that comes true because it’s been written down. It became so easy to travel to distant, sometimes imaginary lands, meet new people, and experience new cultures.

This was an ‘aha’ moment. I knew I would never stop. It was also around this time that I started writing down my own stories, I wrote of children’s adventures I wished I had. A few years after this, I happened on romantic fiction through Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Ahhh Jane Eyre… Charlotte Bronte was an amazing storyteller. Not only was the plot in the story as tight as a drum, the romance was so sweet. What an emotional rollercoaster. The build-up of their love was soft and touching, there were twists to keep you turning the page. I ended up reading the book several times in the following years.

Hundreds of novels have passed through my hands in the years since, and among them are authors that I will never forget. They reached right into my ribcage and squeezed, sometimes hard enough to make my eyes leak.They include Bertha M. Clay, Danielle Steele, Nora Roberts, Elechi Amadi , Sidney Sheldon, Buchi Emecheta, Harold Robbins, Judith Krantz, Helen Ovbiagele and Barbara Delinsky among others too numerous to mention. They educated me; shaped me, entertained me, and they pierced my heart. Beautifully written, and masterfully crafted, books by these authors had me sobbing at different stages.

I had another ‘aha’ moment. I wanted to write these sorts of books. It became sealed when I read the inspirational romance penned by Francine Rivers, Redeeming Love. I won’t try to describe this book to you. You just have to experience it yourself. I began writing again after that, just before the millennium. And I was writing romance. A Heart to Mend began life from a novella I wrote back then. I wouldn’t compare it to any I have listed but I’m also not ashamed of it. I hope to write more novels and know that they will be better than A Heart to Mend. I also hope that others will one day list my novels when talking about books they’ve read.

So yes, there is something amazing about writing and being able to hold a book you’ve authored. But what fewer writers talk about is reading that book and being captivated by your own story. We rarely talk about being lost in the pages of a good book, of reading throughout the night and having to prop open our eyes with toothpicks the next day, of spending minutes crying or simply thinking after reading a scene in a novel. This is what makes reading so indispensable to me, they can be simply for enjoyment but they also have the ability to change a life, an opinion, a belief, a worldview. So while I write to be authored, I mostly write to be read and to read.
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Book Raffle event in Lagos



Time : Sunday, December 5 · 2:00pm - 4:00pm

Location : The Hub Media Store, Palms Shopping Mall, After 1004 Flats VI, Lagos

More Info :

Join Author Myne Whitman as she reveals the Lagos winners of the book raffle for AHTM. She will also read from A Heart to Mend and her WIP and answer questions from the audience. If you have already bought the book, please come with your raffle tickets.

Prizes include - Starcomms Modem, Camera Battery, SD Cards, Flash Drives and Picture Frames. There will be free signed pictures of the author, bookmarks and stickers for every guest.

Entrance is FREE!
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Remembering Ken Saro Wiwa

I got to know of the social activist Ken Saro Wiwa, as a child, reading the opening credits of his long-running TV series, Basi and Company. Today for most Nigerians, marks the 15th anniversary of his Military execution. Ken Saro-Wiwa was killed for speaking out against injustice and oppression of the minority ethnic groups in the Niger Delta Region by the Nigerian government and by the multinational oil companies, especially Shell.

Kenule Beeson Saro Wiwa, most known as Ken Saro-Wiwa, was born to a prominent Bori family in October 1941. He was a native of Ogoni, in todays Rivers State, South-South Nigeria. Previously an academic, Ken Saro Wiwa went into politics as the Civilian Administrator for the Port of Bonny, near his hometown of Ogoni during the Nigeria-Biafra civil war (1967-1970) and later as regional Commisioner of Education in the Rivers State cabinet. During the 1970s he built up his businesses in real estate and retail and in the 1980s concentrated on his writing, journalism and television production. It was in 1990 that Ken Saro-Wiwa decided to concentrate his efforts to speaking and campaigning about the problems of the oil producing regions of the Niger Delta. He focused on his homeland, Ogoni, and launched the non-violent Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP).

Basi & Co, his popular soap opera, may have often been too advanced for me when it ran on TV, however it had some very engaging characters, with distinctive names, dressings and manners of speech. I thoroughly enjoyed the dialogue and often acted out some of the scenes with my siblings after the show had ended. As one with great imagination, and even then, the stirrings of a writing muse, I was inspired by writers, and as such, the name of the writer of this witty drama stuck with me. As a young teenager, I found and read some of his books and followed his activism. Several children’s adventures later, I was working on a romance novella and waiting to take the entrance exams to university when the news of the execution broke. Ken Saro-Wiwa had been hanged, along with eight others (the Ogoni Nine), by the Nigerian military junta of the day.

I was stunned with disbelief. Saro-Wiwa was a thinker and activist who I had looked up to and aspired to be like. I had been too young to remark the military regime of the now late Gen. Sani Abacha, but then I was forced to consider how they stifled free speech, and how this might affect my own writing, my life. It was not an encouraging picture I saw. As it was, the hangings caused an international outcry and the immediate suspension of Nigeria from the Commonwealth – which lasted three years – as well as the calling back of many foreign diplomats. As the next few years dragged on, several writers, journalists and authors alike, were hounded and prosecuted, several went to jail or prison, and many left the country for asylum elsewhere.

Things are a bit better now. In the years in between Ken Saro Wiwa’s death and today, I had read two more of his books of his experiences during the Nigeria-Biafra civil war. Sozaboy: a Novel in Rotten English, of a naive village boy recruited into the army; and On a Darkling Plain, his personal diary. The first I read as a political university student, active in my faculty and department, an official in some groups and associations. The other I read as a young woman, living and working in Abuja, the new capital city of Nigeria. Both books and most of his others made references to the abuse he saw around him, as the oil companies took riches from beneath the soil of Ogoni land, and in return left them polluted and unusable. The fed into my world view of how the world worked, and why I needed to tell my own story however I could.

Today, 15 years later, I am more grown up and socially aware. I live in the United States by choice and will travel to Nigeria in the next couple of weeks. I am a full time writer, editor and author. My book, A Heart to Mend, has also been published and is doing very well in Nigeria. In March of this year, I established and currently serve as managing editor for a critique website for Nigerian writers called Naija Stories. The aim of the website is to provide a platform of opportunities to aspiring Nigerian writers and get them telling their stories on their own terms. In a press release yesterday by the Niger-Delta Restoration of Hope, two of Naija Stories members had won in a writing competition held to commemorate the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa. Their entries were appropriately titled “Road to Martyrdom” and “Life before Death”.

In his closing statement to the Nigerian military-appointed special tribunal, Ken Saro-Wiwa said;

“We all stand before history. I am a man of peace, of ideas. Appalled by the denigrating poverty of my people who live on a richly endowed land, distressed by their political marginalization and economic strangulation, angered by the devastation of their land, their ultimate heritage, anxious to preserve their right to life and to a decent living, and determined to usher to this country as a whole a fair and just democratic system which protects everyone and every ethnic group and gives us all a valid claim to human civilization, I have devoted my intellectual and material resources, my very life, to a cause in which I have total belief and from which I cannot be blackmailed or intimidated. I have no doubt at all about the ultimate success of my cause, no matter the trials and tribulations which I and those who believe with me may encounter on our journey. Nor imprisonment nor death can stop our ultimate victory.”

On Friday, the 10th of November 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa was killed. He died for speaking out and making his voice relevant. I, and others will continue speaking.

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About Myne Whitman

Award winning Myne Whitman is the author of A Heart to Mend. Her blog is the Nigerian Blog of the Year 2010 and she also writes for BellaNaija, Afrikan Goddess, Femme Lounge, and other online publications.

Find Myne on AMAZON

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Connecting with an Ex on Facebook

Facebook clocked half a billion users this past month. I know almost everyone reading this, if not all, has an account on Facebook. Today's debate Tuesday is about connecting with exes on Facebook.

facebook.jpgI joined Facebook several years ago as a Masters student but only recently started actively using it after publishing A Heart to Mend. Before then, I was hidden and I frequently culled my friend’s list for those who I felt were not necessary to be there. I wanted my friends list to remain less than 100, and it remained so.

Now as an Author and to promote my book, A Heart to Mend, I’m back to using the media, and my friends list is over a thousand and growing. I’ve added some of those culled people again, among them so-called toasters, chykers and boyfriends. Having heard some tales from friends, and read some articles, I’m left wondering if I’m making a mistake.

Let me back up a bit. When one gets into a new relationship, the expectation is that both people cut any close ties with their exes. Though some of us choose to remain friends with them, it is physically easier to distance ourselves from exes. What happens is that you start hanging out in new spots with the new love, or you establish a new set of friends. The BB messages, phone calls and emails also reduce drastically with the old flame as time passes and both of you pick up new interests and drift apart.

On the web, it may be a different and difficult ball game altogether especially on Facebook. You have their status update automatically popping up on your newsfeed and the same thing happens when they add new photos. Some of us may even feel like the former girlfriend or boyfriend is taunting us. This is most likely the case when these updates have to do with the ex having found a new person. Imagine seeing that red heart which Facebook uses to denote changes to relationship status. I guess it would irk some people to see their ex hook up with someone else just days or weeks after their break-up while they’re nursing a bruised heart.

So what to do? Some people say they will never add their boyfriends as Facebook friends in the first place, and will remain as single until they’re married. I understand not broadcasting that you’re in a relationship which may end up as transient, but not adding the person as a friend doesn’t really sound realistic. Others say they will remove those friends once they become exes. Sounds more doable, at the same time, you may come across as churlish and bitter and who wants to be the one who is worse off by a break up?

Let’s even talk about people who are in exclusive and defined relationships or now married. A lot of us prefer to be ostriches about past sexual or relationship history. For those who do know, do you insist your partner removes all the exes from their friend list? Or do you encourage your partner to add their exes? I’m one who believes in not burning bridges and have found myself doing the latter. I add old flames and ask Atala to feel free to do the same.

Of course, one part of my mind expects that the reconnections will stay superficial. But what if it doesn’t? What if old embers burst back into flame during the course of a cursory Facebook chat? What if you open the door to the kind of ex that will leave hurtful messages that can be misconstrued by those reading. You know the kind of suggestive insinuations that can even set off the person you’re now with?

What do you think and what would you do?
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