One Plus One

🖤THANK YOU !

😭😭😭😭😭

I can't believe it's really the end of this book...again...

Editing the book truly made me fall in love with everybody all over again. I'm going to miss the characters so much. They are definitely my favorites.

I'm still amazed at the fact that this book was inspired from the song Me & U by Bracket. That one line in the song that I've put in the last epilogue has always touched me in a way that I couldn't describe, but I finally found how with this book.

I'm not going to lie, at first I didn't know what I was doing with this story. I just knew that I wanted a book with a dark chocolate couple because you don't have a lot of that here...or y'all need to give me book recommendations ASAP.

Then when I had an idea on the direction I wanted to take with this story, I wasn't sure that it was going to please anybody. It's more chill and was definitely more matured, at least for me. And by matured I mean getting away from everything I wrote since I got on this website.

I'm more than tired of all the ''thug'' books. A man can be more than that. Mainly our black Kings. I think it's important to show them in another light, and that's what I did with Chresanto. He was never involved with the streets life, was not a womanizer, got sexually abused in his childhood (well actually a lot of men went through it but won't talk about it and that's why it was a main topic in the story), is a bit more in touch with his feelings compared to your usual macho man...he was so different and I liked it.

Apparently, you did too.

But it seems like y'all didn't enjoy Ebony just as much and I'm not going to lie, I was sad about it. One author that I follow here once made this comment about how readers are so quick to jump down the female characters for whatever they're doing and after observing it in different books, I have to admit that this shit is actually right.

It just reflects the way women are treated in this society.

Whatever we do is way more criticized than what men do. And a good example for that is the whole cheating situation. When it's a man, people easily found about two thousands excuses to explain why he did that and when it comes to a woman, she's a whore, she doesn't respect herself, etc...

It seems like a lot of readers weren't understanding Ebony. It seemed like the readers didn't understand why she was quick to accuse Santo of cheating, even though there were a lot of elements that explained it. Or they didn't get why she was on her guard when they were still in the talking stage. She was just trying to protect herself.

If you didn't notice, Santo and Ebony were the same, the boy and the girl versions of the same individual. But I guess it was more normal for him to act a certain way because he got sexually abused (?) But...Ebony went through abuse too.

After pieces of her past were exposed to y'all (before she even told the story about Scott), for some reason people were still annoyed with her, even when her behavior was kind of justified. And by kind of justified, I mean you could see why she was acting a certain way.

I'm not saying people were wrong to feel the way they felt, but after living a childhood where you were rejected by people because of your skin tone, got cheated on in your first serious relationship, was rejected by your biological father, mistreated by both biological father and step-father, witnessed your mother getting abused, etc...you wouldn't have acted like she did ? Like when Santo was getting the phone calls and acting weird about it ? I know a lot wouldn't be cool with it if it happened to them.

After editing and reading the book again, I feel like it was easy to understand her behavior. But hey 🤷🏿‍♀️ it is what it is.

I'm not trying to come for anybody's neck, but understand that my characters are my babies so I feel overprotective over them 😩