Akotowaa

Seeing My Work Through Other Artists’ Eyes 🕸️ Issue 17 How Moses Leo brought the woman-centered magic of my Year of Return novella to the Berlin stage

I cried.
open.substack.com/pub/akotowaa...

We’re all about to be in wearable hell I’m rapidly running out of body parts to do my job.

This week's Optimizer is about the very special wearable hell I've been living in recently... and how it's all coming for you too if Big Tech gets its way.

www.theverge.com/column/79793...

I need a vacation for like a month. And by vacation I mean my bed and zero obligations. Maybe a claw-foot tub.

If you're attending Flights of Foundry this weekend, you can catch me at 2 events!
I'll be doing a reading from The Year of Return at hour 23 (for me, that's 3pm GMT today, Saturday) and moderating a panel called Honoring Indigeneity at hour 44 (for me, that's 12pm GMT tomorrow, Sunday).

So, in all the online chatter about Netflix's Wednesday when it first came out, somehow it never crossed my timeline that Wednesday's dance uses choreography from the Tag Team music video made for the 1993 Addams Family Values film.

So how is it possible that Saara El-Arifi published 5 books in 4 years and has another on the way?? I didn’t think anyone could frighten me more than R.F. Kuang! What are they drinking?

Why would the word be vicegerent instead of viceregent? 😞

Oh wait, I just remembered I wrote one this year. Under Clarion West-like duress (I had a 48-hour deadline).

I’ve done some revisions of previously drafted short stories, including CW stories. And I’ve done lots of writing for the novel-in-progress. But my brain has apparently put the knowledge of how to send a story from idea to draft into a jammed junk drawer. 2 years. Zero short stories.
This is GHETTO.

Okay so apparently I have not written any short stories since Clarion West 2023.
Jezos.

You’ve got to ask yourself sometimes, “Is it contradiction or is it nuance?”

I am a bit epic fantasy trilogy-weary right now, I think.

When the book tells you about the typeface it’s set in >>>>>

I just learned the word “melismatic” & I love it!

You would think somebody rearranged my insides last night but no. Leg day at the gym did this to me.

Cover of sauuti Terrors anthology

The Sauútiverse keeps expanding! Behold the cover for our 2nd anthology: Sauúti Terrors!

Following Mothersound, return to the Sauútiverse - our collectively-built, Afrocentric, matriarchal shared-world of strange planets & sound magic - for dark fantasy, SF & horror stories & poetry.

Jan 2026.

LETTER I: Friendship as a creative and healing Practice A love letter to friendship, to co-creation, and to showing up with care. If you have been longing for deeper connections or wondering how to build them with intention, this one is for you.

LETTER I: Friendship as a creative and healing Practice
open.substack.com/pub/manywa/p...

The type of content I love to see.

My last 36 hours have been… ridiculous.
When Poetra Asantewa said “This country will kill you,” I felt that.
This place is full of preventable disasters.

Chale, my heart has really left this city. Sorry to Accra. But Accra is not sorry to me.

It’s okay that it’s bad before it’s good, sometimes.

😭😭😭😭

As for the people in the country with the green and white flag, I don’t even know what caliber of miracles is keeping anyone sane.

I mean, how can we be drowning in mediocrity & thinking it’s cute?

Saying this from a place of hormonal imbalance & an unusually bizarre work day but: everybody who is worth their salt as far as sense & competency needs to get the hell out of this county ASAP & use all that sense somewhere it’s appreciated.

😭

Today years old when I learned that it’s “in medias res” and not “in media res.”

🎉 We are thrilled to share that Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by @wtalabi.bsky.social is shortlisted for the 2025 Aldiss Award 🎉

buff.ly/X6MvXau

I need less.

I loved the Open Book Festival when I attended in 2018, and I hope I get the chance to attend again, one of these years.