Welcome to The Open Ended!

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”

― Lloyd Alexander

If you're reading this and you know me - relatively well- you know I love to write. Or loved. In my "hay day", I relished the opportunity to compose an essay or draft a fictional tale. Somewhere along the way the love became like, and the flame dwindled and flickered until it eventually burnt out.

Recently, however, I rediscovered my love for literature. In my younger years I would devour a new book every three days. The older I got, the more expensive life got and the more other priorities overtook the need for paperbacks. So the book a week became a book a month, then a year, then eventually it became stumbling upon a PDF and attempting (in vain) to read it. That is until 2020. The pandemic brought with it relatively flexible hours and an income. I started to read again and my literary senses tingled with every word.

With that came a feeling I simply couldn't ignore. The urge to write again was simply too strong. Yet, somehow, I was able to keep it at bay for more than a year. At the tail end of last year I stumbled upon a "writing prompts" site. And I opened it. And I looked at the randomly generated plot line. And I pondered. And pondered some more. And eventually I opened Word and wrote a few lines - not particularly good, or with any sort of plot, but it was the cathartic release I needed to get back in the game.

Since then I've generated a lot more prompts, and written a few more stories of significantly better quality. Since then, I have toyed with the idea of starting a blog, an idea I have toyed with for far longer than I wish to admit. Every time there always seemed to be a new obstacle. At first I didn't know what I would write about, and then when I knew that, I didn't know how to even set up a website, then I didn't know how to get people to read it, and so on and so forth the excuses flowed. In the back of my mind I knew there was only one real thing stopping me - fear. I fear that people will be unimpressed. I fear they will be bored by my words and unmoved by my stories. I fear they will tear apart my abilities, and I fear more than anything that I will simply not be good enough.

Even as I write this, those fears are very real, but I am choosing to do it anyway.

The thing is though, this will not be the kind of blog where I muse about the happenings in my life or beautifully document my travels, or insightfully create discourse on current affairs. This will be where I tell stories. Fictional ones. This will be where I hope to create characters that you can resonate with, and that you can love to hate. This will be where the many stories that live in my head will reside, and hopefully find a home on your screen and in your heart (yes, as an aspiring writer, I have to make everything seem that much more poignant). This will hopefully be a space where I can one day write enough chapters to create something more. More than anything, this will simply be a place where you can escape once in a while to a world that isn't like your own, with people with problems, celebrations, milestones and journeys of their own. A world that sheds light into your own reality. Hence the name - The Open Ended. What my stories mean, what effect they have, or don't have - that's for you to conclude.

I also hope to communicate from my point of view as a proudly Kenyan woman, who is almost millennial but not quite Gen Z, trying to navigate this global village we find ourselves in. I am a young woman, struggling to merge the beautiful stories of her culture and upbringing with the rapidly changing and increasingly Westernized world. This space will be a literary expression of that never ending conflict to want to remain tethered to a history I don't know much about whilst appearing current and forward-thinking enough to fit into my present.

This is in effect just the welcome note (even though it has dragged on like 3 chapters) and it was my wish to first let you know why this blog even exists before you get to reading the stories. I hope that you will employ honesty and kindness in how you judge my work. I hope that you enjoy it and if you do, that you will not let my courage come to not. You will read, comment, like and you will tell your friends to do the same, and they will tell theirs (can you tell I like poetry and repetition yet?). More than anything else, I hope you stay for the journey that is to come because I may not know where it is headed, but I have great faith in how happy it has made me to get started.

As they say "perpetual optimism is a force multiplied."