I didn't plan on being a writer. I was born in Zambia, a refugee from a war that most people outside of Africa have never heard of. My family carried stories that didn't make it into textbooks — about what happens when the people who are supposed to protect you are the ones holding the machete, about traditions that get called witchcraft by the same people who worship a man they eat on Sundays.
I moved to the U.S., learned to code, built things. That was supposed to be the story. Move forward, don't look back.
But you can't outrun the things your family lived through. They sit in the back of your mind like a song you didn't choose to memorize. The sibling dynamics, the impossible choices, the way humor survives even when everything else doesn't — none of that fits in a codebase.
Bleeding Roots is what happened when I stopped trying to outrun it. I wanted to write something that felt the way those stories felt when I first heard them — intimate, heavy, sometimes funny in ways that make you uncomfortable. A family with eight children, six of them carrying blessings from gods that the modern world wants to erase. A civil war that turns those blessings into weapons and those siblings into strangers.
I didn't write it to teach anyone about Africa. I wrote it because the story wouldn't let me sleep until I did.
This is where I'll share what I'm working on next, what I'm thinking about, and whatever else doesn't fit neatly into code or fiction.