Daisies By The Roadside

By Pamela Moeng

Quickly checking the rearview mirror, I simultaneously slowed down and eased my silver Toyota Corolla off the highway. I glanced behind me again, checking on the flow of traffic, and to either side of the car for tsotsis before I gingerly stepped out. About 20 metres behind me I could see the pothole that had burst my tyre and put me in this sticky situation.
“For heaven’s sake!” I shouted across the field to my left, thankful that no-one in the cars, taxis, buses and trucks passing could hear me.

The trip back from the coast had been going so well and now this. Traffic had been heavy what with all the post Festive Season revelers returning from the Cape, but overall the drive had been an opportunity to compose my list of New Year’s resolutions and mentally prepare myself for a return to real life. Real life as opposed to being waited on hand and foot by the friends who had been my hosts for two weeks in the windy city of Port Elizabeth. I thought wistfully of those friends now as I opened the boot of the car to check for the fluorescent triangle, which I put a few metres behind the car.

The Flame of Love, By Pamela Moeng

The little red robot man turned green as Andi clutched her bag closer to her body. Throbbing in her pumps, her feet barely touched the ground as the crowd surged across Market Street. Head aching from the heat – Jozi in midsummer was an oven – she moved toward King’s Parking garage.


Fifteen minutes later Andi’s silver Yaris slid into Von Brandeis Street. Traffic was heavy – by the time she drove through the gates into her townhouse complex the sun was setting. Opening the sliding glass door to the evening breeze, she turned on the television. The cast of Isidingo was like family. Three years on, but Andi still wasn’t used to arriving home to an empty house.

After a pre-packaged salad eaten standing against her kitchen counter, she rinsed her fork and the plastic container. Her contribution to the city landfill was hitting overdrive what with all the takeaways she consumed. Just that morning Siza had rebuked her.

“Andi, my friend, it’s enough now. What would Thami say if he could see you like this? You dress like a refugee, your hair is a mess, and you hardly eat.” And then, gently: “Life goes on…”

Opportunity to tell one of my stories on TV?

It looks like opportunities are like trouble: when it rains, it pours. So, on Friday afternoon I had an email, and later a call, from an insert director of a TV programme, asking if I'm interested in working on one or two episodes with them using my children's stories.

I couldn't say YES fast enough!

The first season of the series is already being broadcast on a national TV station , so my story would be used for season 2. Sorry, I can't give details about which series, until details are finalised and i'm sure the production company is cool with my blogging about it.

The insert director has already sent a short brief, and I'm supposed to send her the chosen story I want to work with. Ideally, the story should have some strong visual opportunity.

Anyway, wish me luck, so this opportunity goes very smoothly.

Thank God for Exclusive Books/Seattle Coffee Company

I’ve previously mentioned that I love shopping at Exclusive Books? Well, today I decided I HEART them even more.

I knew that some of the bookstores had the Seattle Coffee Company attached to the premises, but I’d never gone into the coffee shop (opportunity never arose, and I don’t drink coffee at all).

Anyway, today I went to Pretoria for a series of meetings, and I needed a base of operations in-between going to people's offices.

The outlet at Brooklyn Mall was fantastic. They kept the tea coming, and the service was excellent.

Best of all, they did have plug points for me to connect my laptop, and offered me wireless for 10 minutes. Apparently the name and password I got entitled me to 10-minute usage everyday.

Next time I’m in a mall needing a base of operations, I will check them out. Pity the Exclusive Books in my suburb doesn’t have the coffee shop.

I'm on the front page of iWrite2Know

The good news today is that I'm on the front page of the iWrite2Know, where I chat about the OneLove regional campaign.

Please take some time to visit the iW2K site, and leave a comment.

I also want to offer thanks to the iW2K team for profiling me, and for the smooth interview process.

Read the article.

Slow Internet Sucks Big Time!

Internet was so slow yesterday a snail would have walked faster in a race.

It was very annoying, especially as my work is mostly online. So I did not accomplish as much as I planned.

But I did manage to publish a couple of announcements for clients and post links on social networking sites:

IT Skills versus world economic crisis

This is an announcement of the Skills Summit by the ITA, JCSE and ITWeb, taking place on the 19 May at Bytes Technologies in Midrand.

If you are concerned about the IT Skills challenge in South Africa, register for the course. The JCSE and ITWeb will also present the 2009 Skills Survey.

Soul City series 9 reruns on Fridays @ 15h00

Prime time drama Soul City, which is on its ninth season has just finished its initial run on SABC1. However, those who missed it can still catch up by watching reruns on Fridays at 15h00.

The latest Soul City season is a central part of the OneLove campaign in South Africa.

And speaking of the OneLove campaign, campaign, join us on the OneLove web site as we discuss whether one is justified in having an affair if your partner refuses to have sex with you.

What if you even tried to address the problem and went for counselling and also asked for family intervention, but the situation did not improve?

Meanwhile, Janet Riehl Grace's Sightlines ( audio) has arrived. So I'm going to listen to some of it while I work this week, with the view of reviewing it some time in June. I'm also planning to host Janet for her interview during her blog tour.

Readathon Week

On the life front, this week is Readathon Week and Baby's school takes the event very seriously.

In addition to setting aside time for the kids to read at school, and encouraging them to read more at home, the kids are supposed to go to school on Friday dressed as their favourite fantasy character.

For some reason, she has fallen in love with Twilight, so of course she used that book to choose her outfit.

She wants to go as Alice Cullen ( see Alice Cullen doll on the left).

Baby's teacher said the character of Bella Swan (protagonist) was human, and therefore Baby couldn't dress as her.


What is it with this story? When you look at it objectively, it's just another vampire/teen love story. Yet it resonates with millions of people worldwide, young and old. I also found myself completely absorbed in that world, even though it's actually for young adults.

Needless to say, Baby is keen on it despite the fact that she's actually 11 and not the intended target audience.

I am a bit worried about whether portions of the book are too vivid for an 11-year old. But I'm not complaining. It's good to see Baby fall in love with a book. And some of the stuff she watches on TV ( in the afternoons and prime time) are worse, so I'm probably just going to have to deal with my reservations. Unless I can find another book for Baby to fall in love with it in 3 days.

Breast Cancer Hike; Happy Mother's Day

I've posted three poems on my Africans Tales blog, which I have neglected hideously in the past 18 months. My sister wrote two of the poems, and I know I'm biased because I love her, but I think she's the better poet than me.

Check out her work.

Also check out the OneLove blog post, "Having many sexual partners is not liberation" and then share your views on "retaliation affairs" by leaving a comment.

Breast Cancer Hike

This morning I went on a Breast Cancer hike with a group which included two women I went to university with.

We hiked through Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve, which is within an hours drive of Johannesburg and lies close to the town of Heidelberg.

The main feature of the reserve is the Suikerbosrand Mountain Range that forms the backbone of the reserve and varies in height between 1,545m and 1,917m above sea level.



The 10km hike was in support of Sue Dinner, a friend of a friend who is a cancer survivor and has organised a hike to promote cancer awareness in Los Angeles today.

Before Baby, I was quite an avid hiker, and had done a number of destinations including Suikerbosrand and Drakensberg. Yup, moi actually managed to climb Mount Aux Sources, the highest peak in the Drakensberg range.

Then Baby came and I sort of made excuses for myself, saying that I was too busy to go hiking regularly and finding child care was a schlepp etc.

Today I had difficulty climbing the steep end of the trail. My legs and lungs were fine - I walk quite a lot in my neighbourhood. But my waist/core was a mess, especially when we did the steep inclines.

I definitely need to strengthen it, because I'm going back (to Suikerbosrand) and next time I'm taking Baby to do the 4.5 km route. We'll stroll through it so she's not stressed, but I hope she'll love the scenery and the quiet.

Happy Mother's Day!!

Meanwhile, our plans to celebrate Mother's Day are sort of loose. We'll spend the day together, and do what feels fun and natural.


















Baby has already given me my Mother's Day gifts so whatever happens tomorrow is just extra.








She has good taste, doesn't she? I love the silver necklace with the blue pendant.

Friday was my last day at ITWeb. I will now spend most of my time writing for Intrinsic Media, a small privately owned firm that provides media and communications solutions.

However, as I mentioned previusly, I will still write for ITWeb and welcome an IT related story ideas/pitches.

My plan is to focus on Africa/International ICT stories, with a special focus on telecommunications and business strategy. Not breaking news as such, but stories that provide greater insight into the ICT sector in Africa, the players, the SA firms expanding into Africa and the multinational firms entering the markets.

The weird thing is that now that I finished fulltime work, I am more eager to work. Spent most of Sunday working on a couple of articles and blogging. Yeah, yeah, I know I promised some friends that I was going to take it easy for a while. And I am taking it easy!

Posted Setswana poems

My friend Neo Motshumi has written a collection of Setswana poems and is looking for a publisher.

I have posted four poems from the collection. If you read Setswana, please leave a comment. I'm sure she'd be grateful for some comments/affirmations.

Traffic on my children's stories blog exceeds traffic here

The fantabulous news is that traffic on the blog where I posted some of my children's stories now exceeds traffic on Storypot.

The reason I think it's wonderful is because I want people to read my stories. I sure do love it when people visit Storypot and read about how some of the writing happens. Or get to know me a bit.

But ultimately, my greatest wish is that people the world over read my stories and articles.
Now I need to get off my butt and post some of the stories I've already written.

Miss Behave is at The Zone in Rosebank

Camille Lagarrigue, author and illustrator of the Miss Behave books is taking part in the Exclusive Books Children's Festival. Today she's doing a book signing at The Zone in Risebank, starting at 10am.

If you missed today's signing, don't worry. She's also at Monte Casino on Saturday 15th March and Maponya Mall on Saturday 29th March (at 10:00am for both sessions)

Baby loves Camille's books, and she thinks the author herself is cool. So if you can, take pop in with your kids at these bookshops to listen to the stories and say hello if you can. Your kids will thank you.

It’s My Blog’s Second Birthday: Things I Need to Improve On This Blog in 2008

To improve the blog as it enters its third year, I had to look at some of the things I didn't do well . These are not New Year Resolutions and there are no timelines to them. I will get to them, when I get to them.

Still, for 2008, you can look forward to:

1. More book reviews, done regularly to some sort of schedule – I didn’t do book reviews regularly, and I didn’t do many. But I have learnt that they are popular among readers, so I need to get off my duff to read and write.

2. Author interviews – Again, I didn’t do enough of them. Partly because I don’t know many South African children’s authors and partly because they are not aware this blog exists and they can get some publicity.

Through chatting with some local authors, I also realized that some of them under-estimate the power of a blog, or the number of people who actually visit this one. So I went of in a huff if they didn’t immediately jump at the opportunity, deciding that I don’t have the time or the inclination to chase them. Well, if I plan to increase my author interviews here, I will have to find that inclination to chase authors and use it:-)

3. Following up on themes – There have been times when I start out on a certain theme, and then get distracted by work or life, and let it go. Blogs are about conversations and exploring topics and themes.

4. More targeted posts – Sometimes I drift off on irrelevant stuff. That may be interesting when it’s not often. But people come here to read my children’s stories, and about the process through which those stories were created. The rest is fluff, and if I don’t provide what they came for, they will move on. [ For clarity, see point 1, 2 and 3 above]

5. Write more children's stories - That's what people come here for, isn't it?

6. Attract local parents, teachers, librarians to this site - The bottomline is that these are the people who will read my stories to their children and students. That's who I need to be talking to. Sadly, I haven't even begun to start writing articles that would make them want to come back here, if they do find me through search engines.

7. More guest posts, by local authors and parents - I want to open this space for other South African authors to talk about their books, writing processes and creative life. Give them an opportunity to mouth off, and my readers to listen to some else for a change. For guest posts, I don't have many rules, except what you say should be related to the objective and spirit of this blog.

I also want to provide space for parents to tell us writers about what they want, need, what makes them buy a book or pass it by. What kind of stories fascinated your children, and which books were ignored, regardless of how important the message was supposed to be?

Free Stories Blog Gets Some Attention

Today I was feeling blue because of a work-related accident ( deleted an article I shouldn't have, and I couldn't get it back because I created it today and had't backed it up on the network yet). Anyway, my creative juices sort of tanked, and I couldn't concentrate much on writing.

Just to feel productive, I started going through my blogs to see if there were minor updates I could do that didn't actually require much creativity. That's when I realised the space where I post some of my children's stories, was horribly neglected.

Interestingly, the blog has a high Google ranking ( it's on page one when you search for African children's stories). I guess that means all this promotion work I have been doing for the past year is bearing fruit.

But it's no use inviting the whole world to that space, and giving them directions to get there, if I don't regularly put up new stories. Why should readers come back to the same old thing over and over again?

Ironically, that's the most important of my blogs, because that's where I actually write creatively, rather than talking about it.

I think that's why the space intimidates me. It's easy enough to talk about the creative writing process, and share some life adventures and lessons learnt from them. But African Tales is where the fruit of that labour lies; where readers get to sample my stories and decide whether the work I talk about is really all it's cracked to be. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is very scary.

But enough faffing around. Over the holiday season and the beginning of 2008, I will polish some of the stories growing mould in my laptop, and put them up on that blog for people to enjoy. I can only reach my intended objectives for blogging if I write more, publish more, and have more readers exploring the worlds I create.

That's not a new year resolution, BTW. Swore against making them years ago, as I've never been able to keep most of them.

Anyway, I want to thank Martin Auer, of The Happy Hour Storybook for linking his blog with my stories.

Martin, your comment on one of the stories was a wake-up call, because I couldn't even work out when it was left there or how many readers from your blog have been visiting mine.

I also want to thank all the people who've been quietly visiting the space. Much appreciated and please leave a message, just to say whether the story worked for you or not. It helps quite a bit with the creative process.

The history of storytelling in my family

The blog post outlining the history of storytelling in my family is now up on Riehl Life.

For my grandfather, storytelling was a way for him to share our history as a family and community. Born in 1890, he and my grandmother saw a different world to the one I grew up in.

I hope you enjoy this two-part article.

USAASA CEO James Theledi on Why SA Needs to Develop Relevant Local Content For Our Children

I mostly did this video as part of my experiment on my Mobile Life blog. But I couldn't figure out how to load it up on that site, so I brought it here.

James Theledi, CEO of South Africa's Universal Service and Access Agency, was kind enough to be my guinea pig for my first interview using a mobile phone (LG KU990). His agency has the job of ensuring that the poor and disadvantaged also gain access to phones, the Internet and TV/radio services.

Among many issues, some of which I write about here, James and I chatted about the need to develop local content that is relevant for the needs of developing communities.

P.S. This is raw, unedited tape. As soon as I figure out how to edit, the quality will improve.

The Frog Princess Retold

This time I am diverging from my brief of telling African folktales and contemporary stories, but this story was just sitting there at my fingertips, begging me to share it with you. So how could I not?

Please note that my take is very different from the original Russian fairytale The Frog Princess and is not intended to be a revision of that story.

Also note I am not the originator of the concept for this story. I first heard it told by Michael Aitken, MD of the Centratel Group, the largest ICT distributor in Africa.

It was a short joke, more geek humour really, at an event I attended today. But I did flesh it out, put in a proper setting, some characterisation, motivations and dialogue etc.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did writing it!

And thanks Michael, for the inspiration!

National Women's Month

August is National Women's Month in SA, and many of the companies I come into contact with are likely to send me notices as to what they are doing to support children's organisations. So don't be suprised by an unusually high volume of posts related to that issue.

If you'd like to support non-profit organisations in SA, maybe even child-related ones, check out the PRODDER database.

Weekly Update-Memoirs of a Former Zimbabwean Freedom Fighter

In 1978, my school won the Sipolilo Choir Competition. The competition was held almost twenty kilometres away from our home.We were very excited on the journey home, but our joy was short-lived.

When we were arrived at the school with the trophy, we found the school surrounded by Ian Smith’s Rhodesian army.We were all forced in our rural council hall for screening. All the pupils found with marks on their shoulders or those who seemed to be big enough to fight taken for questioning and beating.

The assumption was that some of the students were already part of the liberation army, and with enough torture, information could be extracted from them. Read more.

Some poetry success

Baby was reading through my online stories the other day when she saw the poem “Across the Sea.”

She loved it.

I mean, she really, really loved it. She even started singing the words to some tune going thru her head. She asked to take the poem to school to use in her class’ upcoming musical to be produced in September.

The poem resonated with Baby’s teacher, who sent a message saying she has a friend living overseas and can she please use my poem to send a message to her friend. Not sure if they’ll eventually decide to use it in the musical, but I’m happy it resonated with them.

More good news is that the poem I submitted to Word Salad was published in the Summer 2007 edition. Read it here.

I initially submitted it to another pub, but they rejected it with a note saying the biginning worked, but the rest was mundane. So I cut it, and I cut...

I submitted two articles to Ezine Articles this weekend. Broke through the 1000 hits barrier, with the 18 live stories and the submitted stories published 83 times.

Old Man Moseki

I’m not sure how this story, which I finally called Old Man Moseki, came into being. All the kids I grew up with knew it. It was the classic story you told if you couldn't think of an original/interesting story to tell in class.

Anyway, this version is told from the perspective of an adult. Enjoy.

If you speak/read Setswana, read the original versionhere.

Blog for "Memoir of A Zimbabwean Freedom Fighter"

Amos Nobele was born in Chegutu at the Chegutu General Hospital, on the 4th of September 1963. He was the sixth born in the family of eight children, five boys and three girls.

By the age of 10, he began to ponder joining the Zimbabwean liberation army so he could get revenge for his sister, who was murdered in his presence.

By 14, he was a war spy, entering camping sites of the Rhodesian army under the pretext of selling vegetables.

To follow Amos' story, please visit his new blog. I set it up for him so he can tell his story even while my colleague helps him turn it into a book.

For now, I will update the blog every week. Amos doesn't have access to a computer or Internet. So it's up to my colleague to type up the handwritten entries he gives to her, and for me to put it up online.

I hope you find the story as interesting as we do.

A toast to an old friend: Posted 2 poems & 3 articles

I revised the poem “Youth” and posted it on my free story blog.

I also posted a new poem titled “Across the sea.” It was originally inspired by a close friend of mine – Susan Davies – who immigrated to Australia.

She left South Africa over a decade ago, but the friendship stayed the same. Every time we speak on the phone, the words flow so smoothly it’s like we never stopped seeing each other.

We met in the early 90s, introduced by a literary agent we shared at the time. Susan is fond of saying introducing us is the only thing the agent managed to do for us. Both of us managed to independently land writing projects, even published books, but without the agent’s help.

I also posted 3 articles on Ezine Articles. The experiment trudging along, but no visible increase in traffic yet. Two of the articles I posted are not in my usual style – they are more “how to” rather than IT trend pieces, but I’m trying to see what kind of articles and subject matter (within the scope of what I do) attract the most attention.