Olawale Famodun
Published: 2014-12-31
Total Pages: 104
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It took me several days of wondering absent-mindedly, with the paper before me blank while my pen urged me to put down the very first sentence on my view about my very first adventure. It is truly my first adventure. It does not matter how far I had gone in the past churning out one manuscript after another. It does not matter any longer the dire experience having to sit all alone with over twenty years of scribbling on both rough and clean sheet of papers. I had to put down what had come into my head that is dying to be tabled down. There was an inexplicable inner joy and contentment for me in writing, even if it were rubbish. This first adventure, as I am about to christen it, is by all means not my first manuscript. It has, however, come to take the honor of the first book based on several circumstances that had befallen me. This book has become the first experience the same way a junior sibling in a family may get married and bear offspring before the senior ones. A breakthrough could be essentially a subjective experience. This experience has called for celebration on my part to see this first book out. It is not a matter of how well it does in the market, but what holds me honour is that it came out at all. Over the years, anyone who had been so close to me had always wondered what sort of person I am. They cannot explain what I am doing sitting down alone, staying away from friendship, both male and female, just to write. I have reasoned along with them as well to such an extent that I cannot still say this is the sort of person I am. I ask myself whether writing makes any sense at all, but the devotion is indisputable. This is based mostly on my propensity to sit down alone and write. Just write. I often wonder myself why I write. I kept piling up papers that I have written poetry and prose over the years that during my university years, without any seriousness with my geology, I kept writing. I did it to the detriment of my degree course. And also back in my secondary school days that I believed I would have come out with better grades if I had at no time given any chance to writing. The only time when the writing suffered a setback in the sense that the dedication to it ebbed slightly was when I started work as a junior manager in the corporate world. Even at that the spirit had been established in the previous ten years before my corporate career commenced. Writing nevertheless hanged on to me like a bone accidentally swallowed during a meal. The dream to be an author did not start just one day. I had become acquainted with virtually every literary author ever known, and there was hardly an author that is not my role model. This is evident in that I cannot point to any one author in the sphere of literature as the single most important inspiration. Hence, I had to wander into the field of science, classical music and popular music, traditional life and philosophy to find heroes and heroines. The determination to be an author made me encounter setbacks in terms of financial consideration, but I never let it deter me. I laugh saying deter me because it had come to be part of me in such a way that I knew deep inside that it would just happen no matter the age I get to. I became certain of this when I read articles about men and women who became authors at the ripe old age of seventy. Seventy years old is not a ripe old age when we consider the theme of the last poem in this collection titled 'Baby'. The other major challenge I had which could have turned me back from being an author was someone who I had hoped would assist me. We attended the same secondary school. He was one who had had certain pretense to writing and who after several years of leaving the tertiary institution had ventured unsuccessfully into the printing and publishing line to which he had been accustomed to stark mediocrity. Continued in book . . .
