WRITING ROOM NOTES

I have been building Young, Black & Immortal for a long time.

For years, pieces of this world arrived in flashes—characters I wanted to meet, images I wanted to see, histories I wished existed on the page, Black people allowed to be ancient and powerful and strange and impossibly wealthy and immortal.

In the midst of immense loss, I have found myself returning to this story again and again.

Sometimes I am writing, and sometimes, if I am being truthful, I am retreating.

There is comfort in entering a world where death is not necessarily the end of a story and where ancestors can still have something to say.

The world existed before the grief. But I am building it differently now.

I don’t know that I began building this world because I needed a refuge. I know that, now, it has become one.

— J.C. Samuels