Jackee Budesta Batanda

Jackee Budesta Brands is a Ugandan journalist, writer and entrepreneur.She is a senior managing partner with Success Spark Brand Limited, a communications and educational company, and a co-founder of Mastermind Africa Group Limited, a business-networking group. Quotes My reading trajectory started with reading Ladybird books, Famous Five, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Pacesetters, Danielle Steele and Ludlum, among others. That was the rite of passage. I read books that my big sister initially borrowed for herself from a library run by Alliance Francaise in Kampala, until she actually started borrowing more for me. When I started writing stories in an exercise book, my classmates were very huge fans. My exercise book novel was set in Uganda, Rwanda and Italy; places I had never been to (apart from Uganda) except in the books I had read. Behind every successful writer is a pile of rejection letters and the successful ones are the ones that never give up. I never stopped improving my craft and I understood that they were preparing me for bigger things. It still hurts but I know that that is the process. Reading is always what I go to when I can’t write. I read about the competitions I want to apply to in order to be motivated to write. When I wanted to compete for the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, I downloaded all the winning stories for the previous 10 years, and then looked for a pattern. I realised they were all told in the voice of a child, in the present tense, they captured a moment and were told in the first person narrative. Those are the ingredients I used to write Dance with Me, for which I was awarded Africa regional winner in 2003. As writers, if we want to be read, we need to think about it strategically. Everybody that has succeeded has had a bigger picture. Where do you want to be published? Who do you want to be in five, 10, 15 years? How do you get there? Do you want to be on the New York bestsellers list or do you want to be read by just your family? External links