the one where I wrote a book

I didn’t publish a letter yesterday, Friday, I’m sorry but I have a good excuse — I wrote a book! — If You Will Have Me is now available on Amazon Kindle, Apple Books and KOBO books!

Here’s a quick backstory…

I’ve always loved writing. I wrote my first book at ten (many things happened at that age because it was also when I read my first romance novel), of course, I never published it—my laptop crashed and I lost access to it (I don’t think we had Google Docs then). I wrote many stories after that but never finished them.

I attempted my first novel (a YA story about a girl whose parents were divorcing and she’s navigating life in a new school, I should probably finish it!) at fifteen. At nineteen I wrote, finished and published a short story on a platform that is now disbanded.

I continued to write because I had so many ideas that kept me up at night. However, If You Will Have Me did not come to me in the way my other stories had.

My goal was to publish short stories on my substack once in a while and I was determined to do that in January. All the ideas I had were not working. I had writer’s block for the first two days of trying to write a story.

On Wednesday, the third day, I read this story and it started with something about a date, and it ignited my creative juices. Still no idea what I was going to write I had a scene in my head—a girl on a first date.

I remembered a thought that had been in my head for a while, from watching celebrity interviews of non-Christians who said they were abstinent because of non-religious reasons etc.

So I started with my opening paragraph (I promise you I still had no idea what I was going to write).

““My not drinking, or being a virgin — I hate that the word ‘virgin’ — has nothing to do with virtue. I don’t drink because I like my head clear, and I would rather die than throw up in my own bathroom. Talk less of a public bathroom — I hate going to the club; don’t even get me started. And sex? I hate people in my personal space; it’s too invasive,” I say”

I still had no idea who ‘I’ in the story was, what her name was, what she was doing on a date or who she was on a date with and I just kept writing.

I wrote over 1000 words because again, I was writing this for substack but it didn’t feel like it was finished or it was about to anytime soon. I had to stop writing because I had gone over my allocated writing time.

The next day, I continued. I decided to write 2500 words. I did not stop until I had written over 16,000 words. The story kept flowing.

At 16k, coincidentally, the next day was a Friday and the last day of January and had planned a January dump post. I created this carousel and spontaneously decided to include a screenshot of how many words I’d written.

I thought I was done with the graphic, then I came back again and added “Coming February 14” to the post about the screenshot. The story was already going in the direction of Valentine, so why not publish it on that day, I thought.

And that was it! I finished the book the following week at over 25000 words and my husband was like put it on Amazon and I was like “Duhhh” and I went for it.

I created a group chat with my best friends! Shoutout to Ibukun and Eguolor, and sent them the first draft and they loved it.

My next assignment was to get someone to design the cover but my taste was higher than my budget and timeframe. So I went on Canva to put a bunch of things together.

I sent the book cover to the group chat with different options and was moving things around as they provided feedback. I did something I liked but I didn’t love it enough to put it out so I brought my creative friend, Christabel on board. A few tweaks and an impactful change—switching the title colour from red to pink—later, we had a cover I loved!

I uploaded it to Amazon with the hopes of announcing a preorder the next day and Amazon blocked it immediately. I felt frustrated but my husband encouraged me to still reveal the cover which I did.

The next phase was me going back and forth on Amazon and when it didn’t seem to be working out, I decided at the last minute to publish with Apple and KOBO. But surprisingly, Amazon published my book on my release date!

I learned a lot about myself during the editing phase and it made me reflect on my days as a younger writer when I had a ‘no editing” policy because somehow I felt like I wasn’t talented enough if I had to edit my work. I edit my work now, FYI!

The final version of If You Will Have Me is my edited first draft and I’m very very proud of it! It’s the best story I’ve written and finished, yet, and I can’t wait for you to read it and discuss it with me.

If you’ve read it and you have questions please email me at mojireallenajayi@gmail.com

And as a bonus for making it this far, here’s a link to my old blog (at 16-18year old).