Uju Amanambu

Entrepreneur & Writer | Building worlds in wellness and fiction | Writing while querying

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

Built a home in the last couple of months, and I have been slowly tearing it apart.

Now, I am going to let unhealed trauma do the rest for me.

Why is my heart breaking so much? Why this dread?

But the page must be rendered true.

#writing

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

@emeoga Thank you so much!

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

To birthdays and unfolding dreams.

To writing.

To worlds where we get to live vicariously, and to characters who find us and become a part of us.

To living life on your own terms, because writing isn’t just something you do.

It’s where you find meaning.

Soonest, Babe!

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

Some books, you race to the end because the world won’t wait.
Some books;
You pause.
You reflect.
You laugh.
You love.
You ache
You break down completely.
And yet, you keep going.
Because you can’t stop.
To The Feathered Diamond,
May you, one day, find those that need you.

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

And that beard -
the stokes of steady fire.
A beard with an ancestral calling,
kissed by the gods of flame.

Firebeard.

I name you before I know your name.

Firebeard, the dreamwalker

Uju Amanambu

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

I threw one more glance.

What a beautiful man!
Kind, expressive eyes.
Lips that smiled so easily as if joy was its only language.
A voice like petals falling on silk
yet carrying the weight of steel.

1/2

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

@drJo3stiredofX Oh no!

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

@mooninabucket Still not sure how this prose won an award. It’s horrible! I don’t think the judges read it. Maybe there were other criteria for winning-because there’s just no way.

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

I wrote a protagonist who thrives in a forest, and now my home is filled with plants.

More to come until I turn my home into an enchanted forest 😂.

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

Look, I think the AI suspicion here is almost secondary. The primary problem is that a story with a prose that bad got selected by Granta.

Why?

Did any of the judges read the story at all?

[New York Magazine @NYMag]

Can AI write literature and get away with it? On May 16, the Commonwealth Foundation announced the regional winners of its Short Story Prize. A few days later, the winning entry from the Caribbean, “The Serpent in the Grove,” by Jamir Nazir of Trinidad, was drawing attention online because some people thought it, and other prize-winning stories, reads uncomfortably like AI-generated text.

The story, which was published on the literary magazine ‘Granta’’s site after being selected, is crammed with metaphor and simile. Some descriptions are even bizarre: “The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink”; “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” There are other hallmarks of AI writing, like negative parallelisms and anaphora, or the repetition of words at the beginning of successive sentences or clauses.

Razmi Farook, director general of the Commonwealth Foundation, said that the prize committee does not use AI checkers in the judging process, calling those programs “not unfailing or infallible.” (Several people online said that AI-checking tools deemed “The Serpent in the Grove” to be 100 percent AI generated. ) “All shortlisted writers have personally stated that no AI was used and, upon further consultation, the Foundation has confirmed this,” her statement reads.

A concurrent statement sent by ‘Granta’ publisher Sigrid Rausing was less sure, writing that she and her colleagues ran the story through Claude, which concluded that it was “almost certainly” written with the help of an AI tool, though it might have a “human core.” A representative from ‘Granta’ confirmed that its editors did not participate in the selection.

Sign up for our Book Gossip newsletter to read more about the controversy and why this is the type of news story we’re regrettably about to see more of: https://t.co/tVDsCWeTOv

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

@du_peee I don’t know about writing with AI but the excerpts I have seen are so badly written that I even think AI might do better.

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

Thank you!

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

Okay. World building/World Bible done. Now the writing starts. I have neither written a Romantasy nor written in the first person.

This is going to be interesting. Fingers crossed. Excited to see how it turns out.

#writing

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

One day you are flying through the skies, the next you are wrestling gods, then you are on top of a dragon, next you are in the arms of a mysterious billionaire dancing away the night.
The adventure. The thrill. The pursuit.
I am a writer. #writing

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

Sunday coffee + Brunch. Reading my first chapter for the umpteenth time.

My brain keeps waking me up in the middle of the night with little adjustments here and there.

I guess you never stop working on a book. #amquerying

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

While querying, I’m numbing the itch to write another book with these great reads.

#writersoftwitter #write

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

95k words done and dusted.
I have never been more excited finishing a book.

😰 now I can go back to sleeping properly, eating meat and committing to my workouts.

That book consumed me.

But I had so much fun writing it.

#writing

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

No draft? One take? That’s wild.

Chinua Achebe on Things fall apart

[Pulse Nigeria @PulseNigeria247]

“I don’t object to critics at all, what I do object to is people preaching from a place of ignorance. Even when they’re praising you, you find it’s not for the right reasons.”

- Chinua Achebe in a 1964 interview with Wole Soyinka and South African author Lewis Nkosi

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

Update: She’s also the reason I now think of filling my house with flowers and plants.

She’s a Herald of the Earth Goddess.
I’ve internalized this too.

I need to finish this book before I become completely feral.

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

Fell so deep into my shapeshifter MC’s worldview that I’ve accidentally adopted her vegan ethics.

She can’t eat animals because she IS animals.

Now neither can I apparently???

Tell me I’m not the only writer who’s been colonized by their own character.

#writing #WritingCommunity

[Uju Amanambu @UjuAmanambu]

The worst part? Her love interest is a meat-eating conqueror who enjoys eating her “kin”.