Jay | A Nigerian Girl Sends a Text Message

A few years ago (I think it was 2018), on a certain evening, I was watching 21 Grams — a movie directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. He’s noteworthy for having directed at least three films nominated for Academy Awards in various categories — and he also directed The Revenant, which earned Leonardo DiCaprio his first Oscar. The movie stars Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, and Benicio Del Toro. There's a scene where Naomi Watts’s character calls Sean Penn’s character at 2 a.m., asking him to come over. He arrives, and she starts complaining to him... ” You had me thinking all day; I haven’t spoken to anyone in months and I barely even know you and I already need to talk to you…there’s something the more I think about the less I understand…why the hell did you tell me that you like me? Answer me because I really didn’t like you saying that at all – you can’t just walk up to a woman you barely know and tell her you like her, you can’t, you can’t do that…you don‘t know what she is going through or what she is feeling…” <img src="/media/inline_insight_image/1000333314.jpg">A quick summary of the plot: Sean Penn’s character is terminally ill and in need of a heart transplant. On the day he goes to the hospital to see if a heart is available, Naomi Watts’s character’s husband and two daughters die in a car accident — and Sean Penn’s character receives her husband’s heart, recommended by the hospital.He decides to look into the donor and discovers that Naomi Watts’s character was married to the man whose heart is now keeping him alive. Later in the film, there’s a full-circle moment where he tells her not to worry or be afraid of him — that he’s not there to cause trouble — and that he has a good heart, both literally and figuratively.If you haven’t seen the movie, you should. It’s worth every minute of its runtime. That evening, as I watched the film, there was something about that scene that got my synapses firing. So I booted up MS Word and began to type. I began to tell a story — a true story — about myself, about an experience I had with a certain young damsel.<img src="/media/inline_insight_image/1000333242.jpg" alt="">Many eventful months later, I had Jay — those first few words had grown into an entire book. The full title is Jay | A Nigerian Girl Sends a Text Message — hence the title of this post.You can probably tell from the first few paragraphs that I’m a bit of a movie buff. I can sit for hours — when I’m not debugging JavaScript or Python — and talk about movie directors and film history. Tarantino, Nolan, Fincher, Coppola, Polanski, Scorsese... I could get day drunk just discussing their work. I’ll probably post something about movies when I have the time, but this post is about Jay.So, the book. The first draft was all over the place. I made so many edits (as expected) before it became something readable. I’ve been told I have a “stream of consciousness” style of writing, which made those edits even more important — especially since Jay has a bit of a diary feel to it.<img src="/media/inline_insight_image/freepik__create-a-digital-art-version-of-the-photo-with-the__94130.jpeg" alt="">I had a lot of help with the edits too.My youngest brother, Jerry, was the first person to read it after me. He read the rawest version, so naturally, he had the most to say — even though he’s an introvert.Joshua Omoijiade, a near-genius of a writer and artist, helped a lot. He didn’t pull punches. He told me exactly what needed to change — and so on.Queensely Okon, another brilliant person I know, gave me extremely useful feedback.But perhaps the most exciting feedback I received was from someone called Peace Oshoko. Not because she didn’t critique it objectively, but because the good things she had to say were delivered with so much glee and gusto that I could almost feel the energy in every word of her WhatsApp messages. The story started in Lagos — and, in many ways, ended in New York.<img src="/media/inline_insight_image/1000333240.jpg" alt="" style="background-color: transparent;">I'd leave it to whoever is interested in reading it, to figure out whether the moment in the above picture happened at the end...or not.Anyway, that's that. Here's a link to Jay, if you'd like to read it.https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yy9QUHtZhL7rvuK6xQCE7kalS2AJgJen/view?usp=sharing if you do, I'd be thrilled to know what you think in the comments! And if you've ever written a book or something close to that,  jump in the comments and let's gist!

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