Goree Island. "The Door of No Return."

A while back I was in Dakar, Senegal, and went on a group trip to Goree Island, the westernmost point of the African continent. It is infamous for the "Door of No Return," through which slaves passed to board ships for the Americas. Now the island is a tourist spot, and tourists are assaulted by souvenir hawkers both before boarding the ferry and after arriving. The island has several nice, beach-side restaurants and some elegant boutique hotels. I found this to be very odd, considering it is hallowed ground, believing that the island should be preserved as a memorial, not turned into a means of profit. Those tour guides who condemn the slave trade are now profiting from it.

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Return to Zimbabwe

It's been a long time since I made an entry. A lot has happened. My wife and I returned to Zimbabwe, where we are going to stay for a while before going to the U.S. I like Zimbabwe. In spite of what is reported about the country, the inflation, failing infrastructure, and poverty, the country is a wonderful place and the news media doesn't get it right about Zimbabwe. It's easy to report the negative but not the positive, which are the beauty of the country, the climate (neither heat nor AC is necessary, because of the elevation and proximity to the equator), the people (very friendly (English is the national language), and lack of violent crime, the use of the U.S. dollar, the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables, the general peacefulness. Across the street from where we are staying there is a very posh restaurant, Victoria Twenty-Two , which is maybe better than the St. Regis in Amman. Glad we're not in Amman, considering what is going on in Gaza. Down t...

This Blog. Writing and Publishing.

I am starting this blog to connect with others who might find what I write to be of interest when it comes to their writing and publishing and to write about experiences my wife and I have living in this or that country. We're now in Amman, Jordan, where I am a Fellow in the U.S. State Department's English Language Fellow Program, assigned to the Jordan Media Institute , which is a master's degree program for journalists. More on living in Amman and other countries on other posts. Patricia and James First, about writing. My first novel, The Opium Addict , is out now for preorder on Amason. The novel will be released on June 19, 2023. I just finished correcting the proofs, which was a very tedious process but necessary. Before that, my editor, Tasha Shiedel (The Undead Reader), copy-edited the MS, which took more than a month, mostly because I kept making changes. I wrote The Opium Addict back in 2018, put it away, then revised it during the pandemic, when I was in Zimba...

For the past several days I've been working with Amazon ads to promote the novella I have self-published, “Love Is Thicker Than Forget.” The title is taken from a famous e. e. cummings poem and directly connects to the storyline. I have posted the cover on a previous blog. Amazon ads, if a person knows what they're doing, can have a major impact on sales figures, but because I just started the ads I haven't seen that yet. The key to it all is to be patient, from what I've researched, and adjust the ads after sixty or ninety days, and not to adjust more than that, because Amazon's algorithms will not be able to adjust, and not to spend too much per day, because you might end up wasting money. There is a way to put in keywords, or a person can allow Amazon to do that based on the description of the book, which is what I've done. The novel I have on Amazon that was published by an independent publisher doesn't allow me as much flexibility with ads as KDP d...

The Expatriate

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