Girl, On Hiatus

In one of the comments I got from the three posts I put up so far, my friend said he did not care for Morenike the party girl at all. You know, the one who only paid attention to the guest at the party when she needed her opinion, the one who was obsessed with nail polish, the one who dates clients. I thought, oh! Is Morenike a vapid, vain woman? Then I thought, am I a vapid, vain woman for not noticing that the character I’d created was? Then I thought, Morenike is not you. Then I thought, uh oh.

That comment helped me realise that I hadn’t paid any attention to what I was writing, why I was writing, or what I wanted to achieve by writing.

I started writing Morenike without a voice. I didn’t know who she was, I didn’t know what she sounded like, I didn’t know what she wanted. I let her name roll around in my head, and each update reflected whatever Omotayo was feeling at Time of Typing (TOT™). But you can’t build a whole person on snippets of uncertainty and, without a personality to love or loathe, adore or abhor, the words are just an empty shell; clever constructs without the core that creates a connection. Wink.

So, Morenike is on hiatus. It’s lonely in my head, in the corner where she is, and so I need to play with her a bit more. Find out what she wants, now that she’s kissed Bigfoot. Find out what she’d do with a broken heart, if it came to that.

I want this story to mean something, to explore the reasons why women make the choices they do in love that they wouldn’t anywhere else. I’d like to examine the idea of identity – the choices we make because of who we want to be, who we think we are and who we would like to be. And, what do others see when they look at us? Vain, vapid or, you know, vigilant and vociferous? I’m very visibly vying for verve, here. Just throwing words unto the pile, ignore.

But, what will happen to my story-a-week, the point of this entire exercise? Will I go right back to slacking again?

No, no, I won’t. There will be slices of stories and snippets of stuff splayed in sequence for subscribers to see. Ha.

Also. Morenike's illustrator is getting married soooon :D