I’m feeling good. The worst part of residency is over, the anticipation and the fear. I still haven’t reached that magical milestone where I am more competent than the good nurses but that will take time. I am also on vacation which is lovely. Sitting here on the beach in all my cocoa-bronze glory I reached for a book one of my girlfriends recommended and immediately understood why Erin hates Lisa Scottoline so much. I am talking about Black Urban Fiction.

First a little background. I am on vacation because 1) residency isn’t as bad as doctors would have you believe and 2) Simon knows a blood lab technician who owes him a BIG favor.  Like any other job if you cover for someone they cover for you later. Now if someone covers for me they have the option of getting all their lab work expedited for a week and the gunners love that.

Now that I’ve cleared that up let’s go back to Black Urban Fiction aka what the majority of commercially successful black writers are up to. Basically these are poorly written novels that would be between 3-5 episodes of Sex and the City (successful women of ambiguous age who keep running into men one or two characteristics shy of being Mr. Right) but instead of taking place in bars, bedrooms and coffee shops this trifling bullshit places itself out inside predominantly black churches.  So during slavery we produced Douglass, Reconstruction gave us Washington and DuBois, Jim Crow gave us Wright and Hughes and now we borrow 7 times what the average American makes in a year to produce…this?!  Back when I used to date Alpha Man I did my girlfriendly duty by mocking his writing ambition and laughing when he talked about not “selling out” because after all when you’ve got nothing what have you to sell? Now I understand.

Before I go however I would be remissed if I did not speak briefly about the desecration of the church and it’s teachings. I am not going to get into my own faith or lack thereof because it’s none of your damn business BUT it’s an indisputable historical fact that the church was where the seeds of abolition and later Civil Rights were sown. It’s an indisputable historical fact that hate mongers bomb and burn churches – most famously the one in Birmingham that killed four little girls just like I used to be.

Now I know it’s not all the author’s fault. Publishing a book is absurdly hard and doubly so for a black author. But once you get your name out there PLEASE write something of substance or if you are unable find a ghost writer who can. Alpha Man works cheap.