Matters of the subconscious affect reality in ways we don't quite realize.

In my perfect imagination, with stern discipline I rise with the first bird, salute the dawn, have a healthy breakfast of fruits, wander over to my faux-oak desk, tap the On button on my Macbook Air, acknowledge the muse, and skip into the world where the story flows over the day and into the night.

It may not seem that way, but I am an absolute optimist, an unrepentant optimist.

The young readers I have interacted with carry old concerns repackaged in the skin of a new generation: puzzlement over continuous national moral failings, contradictions with the elders, nostalgia for a nonexistent Kenyan past.

Kenya is a mercurial character. I feel the country has a presence that can turn on its people in a very violent way.

For Kenya: we have a chance to start again each time we meet one another. The ghosts do not need to define the future.

Dying away from home, away from the soil of your birth - and to do so unseen and unmourned - is a profound horror.