#3: A Dream Within a Dream

midyear updates on life and publishing

This newsletter is four days late. I can hear someone in the crowd grumbling that, given that the last one was over six months ago, this newsletter is way beyond four days late. So perhaps, I should rephrase: this newsletter is four days later than intended.

The start of the second half of the year is a good time to catch up on everything that has happened between January and June. But my plan to send this out on July 1 quickly drowned amid crazy class schedules, lab sessions, report writing, and unending assignment submissions. I'm writing this on a commute to another class, so this might be a speedy one.

2025 has been an incredibly busy year so far, academically. I'm in the second semester of my third year at the university, and anyone who knows anything about being a student doing a five-year undergrad programme in a Nigerian university knows that third years are the handiwork of the devil: designed to test and bend and break your limits. January and February were spent rigorously preparing for the first semester exams, which lasted from the end of February to the beginning of May. It was truly a hectic one. Second semester kicked off almost immediately afterward, and so we've continued the bumpy ride.

It's my debut year, too. Which means that things have been busy in the writing/publishing aspect of my life as well. In January, I received my last editorial notes, which I spoke about expecting in the previous newsletter. Thankfully, I had little work to do, all easy fixes and check-offs. Long last, after over four years of hard work on THE CRIMSON VIGILANTE, I finally washed my hands off the book.

Once the edits were finalised, the book went out for blurbs. I remember waking up to an email from my publisher that Leye Adenle, one of my favourite authors, had read the manuscript. It certainly felt like a dream. We got other authors to blurb the book, too, and having the names and blurbs from writers I adore on my cover feels like a full circle to me.

I've also spent the past couple of months trying various things for marketing. Promoting a book online, I've come to realize, can be quite a difficult and exhausting task. While I enjoy tweeting about my book, filming for places like TikTok and Instagram makes me anxious. I know I don't have to do them, but not doing them also makes me worried that I'm tanking my sales by not utilising social media for promotion to the fullest. It's like existing in a conundrum—damned if you do it, dammed if you don't.

Still on promotions, I hired an artist to draw Tomiwa and Bidemi, the main characters from THE CRIMSON VIGILANTE, in April. It was money well spent because the resulting art was (is) gorgeous! Don't take my word for it? See for yourself:

art by x_da.ra_x (IG)

A preorder campaign is also ongoing, where if you preorder THE CRIMSON VIGILANTE and submit your receipt before July 25, you'll get a print copy of the art. It's open internationally, so go preorder and submit your receipts here.

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The thing about publishing is that nothing happens until everything happens. June was the month everything happened. The crowning of the first half of the year, if you will.

My publisher, which is domiciled in Nigeria, has been shopping the book around to agents and/or foreign publishers for a while now. When they first told me this, I didn't press for further information. As I've detailed here, I had already queried THE CRIMSON VIGILANTE to a handful of agents before getting my book deal. It was an almost depressing experience that didn't end the way I had hoped. And so, it made sense not to put too much hope into it again, lest they get dashed like the first time.

I carried on with my life: attending classes, turning in lab reports every other week, doing bits of promotion here and there. Then, one afternoon in June, in a particularly boring binary distillation class, I picked up my phone and turned on my data connection. An email came in and the subject line made my heart stop for a nanosecond. Offer of representation.

An agent my publisher had sent the manuscript to was offering to take it on board. To take me on board.

As I said here, it was the biggest news of my life. I have dreamt and prayed and longed for a day like that since I started my first book in 2019. And it finally came.

I will tell you this for sure, dear reader, the worst place to open an important email with a significant life/career update is in public, especially in a class with over 50 students.

Tears pooled in my eyes as I skimmed through the email, taking notes of details such as this was also the agent who represents Leye Adenle, amongst other things. I put my phone away, but the tears wouldn't go away. I tried my best to swipe at them before they fell (leaving the class wasn't really an option because then I'd have the whole room’s attention on me). Still, I'm afraid some of my classmates will forever remember me as the weirdo who was teary-eyed in the middle of a distillation class.

I managed to pull through the two-hour class without completely dissolving into an utter mess. Later in my room, though, I allowed myself the freedom to feel the weight of what this means to me. Because it did mean the world to me.

I hate a sappy grass-to-grace story, but the truth is, people of my background do not get a book deal at 19, not to mention getting published or having an agent when they're just 21. These are dreams attainable for people on the other side of the world and perhaps more well-to-do Nigerians. To someone like me, a boy from Mushin whose formally uneducated parents have to make ends meet on low-grade jobs, these things always had an air of dreaming above my station.

And so, to realize, one random afternoon in June, that I was living this dream was absolutely crushing in the most positive way. I cried more than I thought I would. Writing about it right now still makes me emotional.

That wasn't the only time I cried in the last week of June. The finished copies of THE CRIMSON VIGILANTE arrived a couple of days after. I don't think I need to explain why this made me teary. The pictures speak for themselves:

I don't think anyone could have held this beauty in their hands for the first time and not shed some tears. I don't make the rules. It is what it is.

July started on a rocky note, and this week has been perhaps the most stressful and terrible one of my life, but I'm powering through with some of the remnant joys from June.

THE CRIMSON VIGILANTE will be out in a little over a month, results from last semester are turning up fine, and I have love to hold me through it all. I'm content.

That's all of it from me. How has the first half of the year been for you? Feel free to share!

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