Book Reviews Needed For The Stella Trilogy

Hey guys!

I am gearing up to release the last book in The Stella Trilogy, The Road to Freedom. After this book drops the series will be complete. Whoo hoo!

But what’s that saying? The real work begins after you release the book? Yea, that.

I don’t know who said it first, but there are no lies told here.

As book three is on its way out, I would like to draw more attention to books one and two by getting some book reviews in. As you guys know, these books were originally published in 2015-2016 but due to major editorial and formatting issues, I have had to take them down and relaunch them. One major risk of taking them down was losing the little reviews the books had. That was a risk I was willing to take if it meant a better reading experience. There are over three thousand followers of this blog. I am hoping I can get a few of you to help.

I just thought I’d ask. What’s that other saying? “Closed mouths don’t get fed.”

  • If you have read any of these books, it would mean everything if you could review them on amazon. Review book one here. Review book two here.

 

  • If you have never read these books and would like to receive an ARC copy, it would delight me to send it to you.

Comment below, contact me through the contact form or email me directly at yecheilyah@yecheilyahysrayl.com.

 

Ya’ll like my new yellow dress? Cute right?

SugarCoated and Springtime

They get tired of hearing it.
Ain’t nobody got to say it,
I know that they get tired.
Tired of these distractions in brown-colored skin
waking up from Valley’s
with muscles and tendons
all conscious-like.
Uncovering the blood in the American Flag—
Tired, tethered, and intoxicated
with his story.
Unraveling the color of bigotry on a beautiful glass,
Smeared fingerprints and fallen stars like
Why they keep sittin’ in?
Between our comfort and a hard place.
America,
This be some kinda hard place
for brown-colored skin
in the springtime.

Strange fruit popping up again on trees,
‘cept Nina ain’t here to sing us a song.
After 400 years
songs just don’t work anymore.
Tired of these guns accidentally going off,
Landing somewhere in my purse.
somewhere in my womb.
Somewhere in my future between lipstick and foundation.
I’ve got to warn my sons
about accidental guns.
Generational homicide got me on my knees praying
the badge
ain’t got his name on it.
Let’s be accurate about it.
Will I be left with the fragmented
pieces of my husband’s shoes
between our front porch and the living room floor?

Will my kiss linger long enough to bring him home tonight?
Or will I suffer a widow’s fate of mistaken identity?
After all, these brown, tan, bronze, and mahogany-colored
skins all do look the same…
Don’t they?

I’m afraid of your guns.
They don’t know the difference
between friend and foe–
or maybe, they do.
Funny how bullets be mistakin’ themselves for judges
that ain’t got names on them.
They say a gun
ain’t got a name on it.
Why are they sugar-coating it?

‘Cause people get tired of hearing about all this black…
All this oppression,
All these curses,
All this power like,
Why we won’t pour sugar on top of these bodies?
Get ’em up off the street.
Don’t want our bullets to get stirred up, ya know.
Getting up outta beds,
loading themselves into chambers
and taking walks at night,
in the afternoon, and especially in the morning,
when it’s springtime.

Fun Fact: I first wrote this poem four years ago (almost to the day). Reposting because it is still fitting for today’s climate. You can find it in my I am Soul poetry collection. 

Writers Wednesday – Chapter 10: The Women with Blue Eyes

Chapter 10: “The El Che Steakhouse Murders”

Big Steve felt the phone vibrate in his jeans as they entered El Che Steakhouse and Bar, but he ignored it. This was like one of those moments in the movies where someone sees a white light during a near-death experience, but he wasn’t dead, and this light was blue.

“Hey, fam, ya’ll see that?”

Big Steve tapped his friends, Chris and Marquis, as they made it to their table on the other side of the restaurant.

“Damn,” said Marquise.

The men sat down at the table, “Look like its our lucky day fellas,” said Chris.

Steve pointed to the table in the distance, “Look at they eyes though.”

“I’m not screwing her eyes,” Chris said laughing.

“I’m serious though. Ya’ll don’t think that’s weird?”

“Maybe they contacts,” said Marquise.

Steve shook his head, “I ain’t never seen contacts that bright bro.”

“What can I get you gentlemen?” asked the waiter but the men were glued to the other table.

“Hello?” The Waitress rolled her eyes.

“Uh yea, water,” said Chris.”

The waitress put her hands on her hips, looked over at the other table and then back to the men.

“Everybody want water?”

“Yep,” said Marquise, still staring across the room.

“Let me get a shot of crown, no ice,” said Steve.

The waitress wrote down his order, rolled her eyes again and walked off.

Chris got up from the table and Big Steve grabbed his arm, “What you doing man?”

“Imma go talk to her.”

Steve frowned, “what?”

“I ain’t about to sit here with my tongue out like ya’ll. Got my eye on that little Japanese one. I love it when they little like that.”

The men laughed hard and the women across the room all turned to look at them, their crystal blue eyes piercing. It was like a lucid dream. Either this wasn’t really happening, or they were three of the luckiest men on Earth. Time seemed to stop as the women looked deeply into their eyes from across the room.

“Maybe I should just sit here a minute,” said Chris, unable to take his eyes off the Japanese one. He didn’t know if she was that fine or if he actually couldn’t look away.

In seconds, the women appeared right in front of them, their bodies bursting out of their clothing. Steve didn’t know how they had made it over to their table so quickly or how the thickest, darkest, sexist found her way onto his lap, his chin in her hands, her eyes locked on his. He wiped his brow. It had suddenly gotten hot.

***

Paschar turned around, slowly, careful to pay attention to every inch of her body. As she locked eyes with the biggest man at the table, her girls followed suit, rays of blue light shooting like lasers into the men’s eyes. They had frozen time and within seconds had glided over to the table. It didn’t matter that there were seven of them and three of the men. Men who thought they were getting orgies were the easiest victims anyway.

Paschar sat her booty on top of the man’s lap, strategically placing it on the part of his jeans where his penis was rock hard. Their lips met and she kissed him deeply, strongly. She enjoyed the kissing, their tongues lapping onto the other, the fresh taste of his scent. She could taste his essence. His past and his present. Everything that led him to this place was on her tongue. Everyone in the restaurant disappeared and it was just her and him.

She inhaled and with it sucked the oxygen out of his lungs, slowly suffocating him. Big Steve’s eyes swelled with surprise, his erect penis was now limp at the door of death. He couldn’t breathe. He knew it was something strange about these women, but it was too late. She had latched onto his mouth and wouldn’t let go. He pushed hard against her body, but she was like concrete. He was well over 200lbs. How in the hell was she stronger than he was?

The color drained from his face as he pushed but the woman didn’t move. Steve’s head got smaller as his body shrunk, his skin clinging onto his bones. The same was happening to his friends, their clothing was getting bigger and baggy as the women sucked the energy from their body. Paschar kept her lips locked on Steve’ and sucked until he was a sunken corpse before her.

She stood and searched the man’s pockets for the device that kept vibrating. She touched the screen. She learned how to operate cell phones years ago. It was strange how addicted the humans were to it, but she had to respect Hephaestus’s work, God of technology. He was getting his just as she had just gotten hers. She read the words on the screen.

Jason: Eh, I’m on my way, where ya’ll at?

Jason: Steve…

Jason: Eh, Steve where ya’ll at?

Jason: Hey man I’m not gonna be able to make it, somebody hit my shit, call me.

Jason: Hey man, sorry I missed ya’ll earlier. We got it taken care of. Tried calling. Hit me back. Peace.

Paschar smiled, wiping the sides of her mouth with a finger as Steve’s energy pulsated throughout her body. The girls had finished their meals as well. She slipped the phone into her purse and the women vanished, leaving three corpses at the table.

Chapter 11 “She’s Involved”

Are you new to this series? Click here to start from chapter one.

If My Books Shall Die

jez-timms-unsplash

I read James Baldwin today

and realized I was carrying his bones

in the crooks of my arms,

and that if my books shall die,

then I have labored in vain.

 

I have swam through centuries

and ran years in someone else’s shoes,

I have climbed mountains

and crawled under valleys

only to bleed death.

I have wasted my time

carving obsession into paper

with invisible ink,

Words fallen like stars

on deaf ears.

 

If my books shall die,

then let me not be born.

Take me back to the safety

of my mother’s womb,

the privacy

of not yet existing

if my works have been in vain.

 

If my books shall die,

then I do not exist.

Not on the tops of your shelves,

or faced down on kitchen counters,

or underneath your children’s beds.

Honor me

in the palms of your hands

and not standing next to Grandmother’s old picture in the living room—

Grandmother is dead

and I do not wish to die.

 

Give me my flowers today

and accept the life I offer you

in the form of metaphors

On silver platters,

For I am feeding you

with silver spoons

and all you’ve got to do is eat…

I offer you

the best of me.

 

And when I am dead,

no longer among the living

crack open a book written by me

and feel my breath on your skin.

Hear my voice resurrect

from inside an ancient pen,

Watch my tongue dance,

See my lips move

and witness passion soar from beyond the grave.

 

If my books shall die

then my words did not really contain life,

But if my books shall live…

What are you waiting for?

Go to your bookshelf,

Resurrect me

and carry

my bones.

Revising The Stella Trilogy: Crafting Authentic Historical Details

In Beyond the Colored Line, book two of The Stella Trilogy, we meet Noah Daniels who is a member of The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. There are two books I read that helped me to conceptualize his character in the most authentic way possible: Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton and The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther by Jeffrey Haas.

These books helped me to capture the language and the spirit of the movement as realistically as possible. I modeled Noah’s persona after both Huey Newton and Fred Hampton. Noah uses terms like “Pig,” regarding the police like the Panthers did in the 60s, but reading Newton’s story helped me to understand this wasn’t a random term they pulled out of the sky to be derogatory.

Black Panther rhetoric like “All Power to the People,” and the concept of “pig,” came with Newton’s interest in A. J. Ayer’s logical positivism, that nothing can be real if it cannot be conceptualized, articulated, and shared. While I do not agree with this philosophy as a person of faith (because faith is the opposite of this…the belief and expectation of something even when you cannot see it), it was helpful in me understanding the Panthers on a deeper level and thus helped me to make Noah’s story more real.

Not all research needs to be included in the story so you won’t hear Noah quoting A.J. Ayer. The point of research for historical books is to help the writer to better understand the culture of the time so the characters can interact with the setting genuinely.

Historical Fiction is not an easy genre to write because while the story itself is fictional, the dialogue and personas of the characters have to be true to the time. A young person living in 1960 wouldn’t speak like a young person living in 2020. If done right, adding authentic historical details enrich the story by triggering memories of the past.

Excerpt from Chapter Ten:

“That just bugs me. We supposed to march and get hit upside the head by the pigs?” he would say in conversations with his mother when he would visit her. Unlike many young black men raised by their mothers, Noah’s mother had decided early on that her son’s narrative would be different. When he came of age, she would turn him over to be raised by his father. She could provide a lot of things, but she could not teach him how to be a man. She supported most of Noah’s radicalism, but only to an extent.

“Now don’t you go rappin’ ‘bout all that communist jive talk in here boy. Violence and hatred never helped to expand no revolution.”

“But Ma, that’s where you’re wrong. It’s not about violence. It’s about defending ourselves. Violence is only the guilt complex that exists in the minds of America.”

Mama Daniels would lift her head to the ceiling, wishing she’d said nothing.

“To say that a man is violent because he defends himself does not differ from saying a man who is being lynched and thus fighting back is himself violent because he fights back.”

“Boy, what? You know, sometimes I wish you weren’t so smart.”

Noah laughed, “’cause you know I’m right. Mama, white Americans know that they have been violent against Negroes, and they fear that one day the Negro will do unto them as they have done unto the Negro.”

The 1960s presented a new wave of leadership and identity for people of color who went from being Negroes to Blacks. Just the previous year, the heavyweight champion, Muhammad Ali refused induction into the army on both religious and political grounds. The epitome of the black power movement was the Black Panther Party, founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. This party organized the use of self-defense in the accomplishment of black justice and was right up Noah’s alley.

Stella: Beyond the Colored Line

Get it Here.

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Thank You

When I first started this blog I always celebrated the small growth. I have learned to appreciate my journey without comparing it to anyone else’s, to clap for myself without feeling the need to explain it, and to double check that everything I do is in humility and not to feed the ego.

I have learned the importance of owning my stuff.

Owning your stuff means to own your decisions and accomplishments even if others do not deem it important.

Owning your stuff means to be proud of yourself without prefacing it with that insecure, “I know this not as better as some,” stuff.

If you can’t be proud of you, who will?

Stop lessening your value. You don’t have to be like everyone else or do what everyone else is doing. A perfect example is how everyone is going LIVE now. That is great and I love how people are being creative amid this pandemic, but you don’t have to go LIVE if it’s not you. There is no one way to be successful online.

Do what feels right with your soul first because as COVID has reminded us, life is not all about numbers, followers, likes, and it is not all about money. That is not why I acknowledge these mini milestones as I have done since I started this blog.

…but I am getting sidetracked…

Thank you for following this blog, for supporting my writing, and for being a part of this journey.

Thank you.

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Enjoy your weekend and please, be safe!