What could be.
What could have been.
What almost was.
A fiction writer and storyteller, writing his way through every version of the story he can imagine.
So, the long version…
I studied Biochemistry. I never practiced a day of it, because somewhere between the lecture halls and the lab coats, stories kept pulling harder.
That pull started early. I was five, maybe six, when my father began bringing books home faster than I could read them. I don’t remember a version of myself before stories were just there, waiting on a shelf. I’ve spent every year since trying to read everything I can get my hands on.
My head runs on alternate versions of things, futures that haven’t happened yet, pasts that could have gone differently, this exact moment if one thing had tilted the other way. That’s why I don’t stay in one genre. Literary fiction, science fiction, horror, thriller, fantasy, whatever the idea needs, I follow it there.
My characters are mostly Nigerian. My worlds are mostly Nigeria, or somewhere close to it. I want those stories told by someone who actually lived inside them, not someone visiting. I’m Igbo, so Igbo folklore shows up in my work more than any other tradition, but I read widely, and when a story calls for a different one, I try to earn the right to tell it.
Some of that writing found homes in Brittle Paper, Philly Chapbook Review, The Ebedi Review, Reedsy Prompts, Soul Candy Press, The Kraken Lore, Rainbow Salad, The Scriber’s Nook, and The Fiction Writer’s Den, and a new one lands in Kalahari Review this November. I also spent a stretch judging short-story submissions for Reedsy’s own contest back in 2020.
Alongside the fiction, I write content and copy for brands as well. If I can hold a reader’s attention to the end of a story, I can hold it through a landing page too.
ZenPens
In 2018, I started ZenPens because I was tired of figuring out the writing life alone. It’s grown into a WhatsApp community of over two hundred writers and creative professionals, all trying to get better at the craft and actually get paid for it. We run monthly contests, host classes, and trade real talk about freelancing, publishing, and making writing pay. It’s still growing, and so am I, right alongside it.
Naija Storyscapes
Dumebi Ogboli and I co-founded Naija Storyscapes from two sides of the same wish. She’s a storyteller and audiobook narrator who wanted unique, authentic Nigerian stories told properly. I wanted my own stories to travel further than a page ever could. So we turn stories into audio narrations paired with visuals, living on TikTok and YouTube. Our telling of Madam Koi-Koi crossed 390,000 views on TikTok, and it’s still the one I point people to first.
Every story begins with a little chaos…
I write in pieces. I’ll be deep into one story when an idea for a completely different one shows up uninvited, so I drop what I’m doing and chase it instead. Right now, I have more unfinished manuscripts than finished ones, and I’ve stopped apologizing for that. Some of my strongest work started as a prompt I couldn’t stop pulling at. And almost all of it happens late at night, well past the point where my head goes a little woozy. That’s when the ideas actually move.
If any of this sounds like your kind of story, the newest ones are always on Substack and Medium first.
contact@somtooezioha.com