The first item on the menu for any politician, big or small, is printing costs: posters, flyers, banners, caps, T-shirts, and even motorcycle reflector jackets for the boda-boda riders so they recognize your name early. I will tell you more about the posters and reflectors—the tortuous processes and the “colourful” characters and low-down weasels who inhabit these spaces—in the next chapter. Suffice it to say that, thanks to a Communist Party comrade, I was able to find a good man called Maxwell deep in the bowels of River Road. In his dusty, third-floor office with a window facing smoggy skies, we bargained for posters, flyers, and banners for Ksh85,046.

The goal of the Banda Book Day celebration was to connect pupils with children’s authors, encourage reading for pleasure, and help young people tap into their own creative potential.

For whatever reason, Maendeleo Chap Chap hadn’t materialized. My friend and fellow EPL football fanatic, Mwingi West MP Charles Ngana Ngusya (CNN), assured me that if I wanted a Wiper nomination for Nairobi West, he could get it for me. But with his party leader, Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, being a bitter foe of my great friend Governor Alfred Mutua, Wiper was as attractive as keeping a viper as a house pet. I briefly considered the Muungano Party, whose chair was then Governor Kivutha Kibwana, a humble man and healthcare champion who had taught me jurisprudence at the Parklands Law Campus, University of Nairobi, at the turn of the millennium. But unable to reach him on his personal phone that week, I dropped that option.

It is mind-boggling that hundreds of years after fleeing hostile environments in other parts of Africa, we still flee from droughts, floods and hunger instead of standing our ground to fight. The overcrowding we fled from in the 14th century has caught up with us in our cities.

In this conversation with Books in Africa host Tracy Ochieng, Kilonzo speaks candidly about beginning as a 12-year-old memoirist, learning the business of publishing through mentorship, protecting parts of her private life in the age of social media, and why she believes “writer’s block” is often just fear disguised as creative paralysis.

Here is something you need to know: blessings are served in single shots, troubles come in doubles, and tragedy is a straight-up triple tot. I was not surprised at all, on the Sunday of Jamhuri Day, to be served with a notice to evict.Later on 20 December at the Karibuni Villas in Mambrui—a mere half-hour drive from the airport where I’d just landed—I was sitting beside an infinity pool seeking advice from the outgoing governor of Machakos and my good long-term friend, Dr. Alfred Mutua. A blue sky stretched above me, and a blue sea reached out into the distance.