These Old Books -- "Of Sorrow and Such", "Binti", and what they meant to me as a writer

This month, I'm featuring two novellas: Of Sorrow and Such by Angela Slatter, and Binti by Nnedi Okorafor.

I read both of these books in 2015, the year when I started writing again after having not written any fiction at all for about 10 years. Together with Kai Ashante Wilson's The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps these books helped spark a profound change in me that year, opening up my brain, my mind, and really all of me, to the possibility of writing fiction again. (I wrote about Wildeeps in ...