I Lied: My First Official Young Adults' Book Is Coming

When I was young, I used to go to this church down in Little Haiti in Miami called St. Paul et Les Martyr D'Haiti. It's the church were I was baptized, where I served as an altar boy. It's the church where many Christmas Eve's, New Year's Eves, and other celebrations in my life were held, and where plenty soup joumou was served.

Every couple of years, and I'm not sure why it wasn't consistent on an annual basis, we would have this sudden spring up of grasshoppers that would pile up on the bushes and plants in front of the church's doorsteps. Of course, as an adult, it's something you wouldn't take mind to, or care about, but as a kid, the grasshoppers were lowkey a spectacle that all of us - my brothers and cousins - kind of took to. Maybe I'm speaking too loud for them, but a 9-year-old Alex took to them so much so that I grabbed some jars and cups, and smuggled some of them home.

I didn't really know much about anything, let alone know the life cycle of grasshoppers. All I knew is that they needed and ate leaves, and that I had about 7 or 8 of them in different containers in my house. Of course, a few of them died, but as I crept down to having maybe 3 or 4 of them, I remember walking into my family's apartment at the time, and right before my eyes on of the small black grasshoppers was on its last push to breaking out of the old skin and popped out in some brand new, yellow iridescent exo. I was equally surprised as I was amazed that not only did I see this happen in front of my eyes, but that grasshoppers did this.

The official term is "molting".

In school you learn so much about metamorphosis, and very little that insects, with their exoskeletons, literally develop their new selves underneath their hard skins and literally break out into a new form. The new grasshopper that popped ou was yellow, and also to my surprise had wings.

It's something you see as a kid that holds little to no significance to you as you grow older into adulthood.

In the intro to A Boy Bathed In Blood, I talked about the likelihood that I would never write a children's book. I find that children's books are sometimes our attempts to push to children things we think children can and should know. Especially in this age of critical race theory and fighting to mandate what real history is, there's a lot of groups trying to shove information down to children in an age where adults are still very much saying, Why didn't we learn this in school?. We can't think like kids. We can't see or re-envision our current world through the lens of kids, and so it feels to me that adults are creating children's books with lessons that some adults today would miss, or still need.

What changes children's thinking are the adults who raise and help raise them. That's 100% my opinion.

But here I am, gearing up to release a book that is honestly neither an adult book or a children's book, at least not in the sense of how I have to assign the story to a genre.

I wrote Black Grasshopper at a point in my life where I was honestly making a decision to change my outlook on how I saw myself, how I wanted my life to go, and how I viewed the world and community. It was a point where I got tired of hiding the real struggles I was having with finding a career that felt satisfying, while battling what may have been imposter syndrome about having to carry the load of a once-flourishing radio and entertainment brand to the expectations I thought everyone had of me.

Three years removed from college, I was actively revisiting the so-called expectations and realizing that so many of them that I was trying to meet weren't even created by me - let alone for me. And fed up with petty charades of what was supposed to be my life's progress, I sat down and for four quick weeks wrote the story that I eventually posted to my Wattpad page.

Black Grasshopper is written in a parable form, about a young grasshopper nymph who lives among his community in a flourishing garden. His struggle though is that he is coming up on his third Spring of not being able to molt. The first year brought shock to everyone in his community, and the second became another let down. As his third approaches, people began to look away, assuming that his inability to molt would eventually lead to his ultimate death. Ashamed of his fall, he commits to finding where the Spring's first wind begins so that he can sabotage the ceremony of all the young nymphs spreading their wings for the first time.

With that commitment, the young nymph will have to leave the garden, cross a valley, and travel through open plains with no real plan on how to stop a gust of wind, and the adventure slowly takes turn after turn for the worst before he realizes that his commitment to stopping the growth and success of others has no impact on his own growth and success.

If you've seen the mini-series, My Real Vivid Life, on YouTube, you may have recalled my mention of Black Grasshopper as a short story I wrote "for myself". It is the first short story I had ever officially written, and I attribute it as the inspiration and catalyst for most of the creativity that would eventually lead to the publishing of We Missed A Meeting, and the phrase "If You Think I'm Dope You Should Tell Me" among other things.

So, is Black Grasshopper a children's book?

Sure. It's a book that you can have your young teenager read and, it's likely they won't digest the magnitude or the relevance of what committing to sabotaging others' success would like like in this sense, but it's also a message that they might also hold on to until that time comes.

As for adults, it's quite relatable, I hope. A reminder that sometimes we do have that flawed way of thinking whether in our careers, relationships, friendships, or just our mindsets in general. Adults can find themselves threatened by the success, or popularity of others, and that was the theme that I wanted to aim for with this story.

Black Grasshopper is for anyone looking for a strong story about the effects of imposter syndrome, and who we become when we attempt to take extreme actions on it. On the other hand, it's about who we become not when we fall, but who we become when we get back up.