Hi. Jack here. I’ve just spent most of the last couple of years writing a book about my time down in South Africa, a country in which I spent a good chunk of time between the ages of 19 and 25. The working title, as you can see above, is This is Africa.
I’d never really considered this kind of thing (writing, that is) an option. Where I grew up, creative stuff wasn’t really considered a “productive” use of time. During/after the pandemic, though, I stopped worrying about all that and threw myself into it. That said, I didn’t really set out to write a whole book. I just knew I had a lot of things to say and a number of (what I hope are) interesting experiences I wanted to get on record. But as the months passed and the words piled up, I started to realize it was too late to turn back.
Anyway, the book (which I may refer to as TIA) will talk about lots of different things: my brushes with death, dismemberment, abduction (by both human and animal), my reflections and observations of life as a young person in the modern world, my frustrations with: peers, social media, the dating landscape, the job market, and with trying to figure out how to feel about not only our future but that of our planet.
But maybe you don’t really care about that kind of thing; you just want to read about the sex lives, drug use, and general debauchery of college kids left to their own devices in a foreign country where the weather’s nice and the booze is cheap. In that case, don’t worry: there’ll be stuff for you, too. (Maybe too much stuff, depending on who you ask!)
Oh? You’d actually prefer to read about nature, or sport, or the complicated relationships between politics, race, and culture in South Africa?
Or maybe you just want to laugh?
In either case, bad news: you’ll have to read it, too. (I'm worried we might be perfect for each other...)
…Only kidding, of course. Anyone who’s interested in any of the stuff above is very welcome here - the book’s just a bonus!
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)👍
Anyway, while all the book/publishing stuff sorts itself out, I wanted to have a place where I could keep writing, and also to put all the junk I had laying around. Writing a book, it turns out, requires writing a lot more than just one book. That is, writing an 80- or 90- or 100,000 word book actually means you’ll be writing a lot more than 80 or 90 or 100,000 words. That might sound obvious to you. But it wouldn’t have to me - before I started, at least. This is probably due to the fact that never in my school career would I have given an essay’s first draft anything more than a spell-check and a cursory skim-through before submitting whatever I’d vomited onto the page. Fortunately - though perhaps this wasn’t actually fortunate, given the bad habits it encouraged - I was good enough at this to get away with it (by get away with it I mean get grades rarely higher than C+ or B-. Not great, but not embarrassing, which I felt was a fair - no, a great - trade off for their having required zero effort).
Part of what I’ve learned over the course of this project is that the maxim of “Writing is actually re-writing” is far, far more [painfully] accurate than I’d have ever thought it could be. I may have been special, unique (and exempt from the editing/revision process) back in school, but if I realized that if I wanted to produce anything I gave a shit about I’d need to come back to the [editing] table with my tail between my legs. In the process of finalizing a manuscript, lots of little stories, comments, musings, and riffs get struck from the manuscript, however necessary this may be, it’s tricky - you get quite attached to this stuff. So, instead of losing those bits forever, I thought it’d be nicer to put them here. Just because they might not be absolutely critical to the story doesn’t mean they’re not worth having on record. This is a good middle ground. (In fact, not only are these bits spared, I actually get the chance to expand on them and go on all the tangents and digressions I want. Yippee!)
Now, then. Where was I…