About me

My name is actually Olufunmilola Olubunmi Motunrayo Aina Adeniran nee Feyisetan but for some reason, I wanted to use a fun, short, catchy name, hence Feyi Aina.

I am a physiotherapist in private practice by day and an author by night. A physiotherapist is a Health Care Professional who takes care of pain after disease or injury and also helps people overcome movement and posture disorders so they can get back to their normal activities of daily living.

I’m married with children, and a writer not a speaker. I find it easier to express my thoughts in words, rather than in speech.

I grew up in Lagos, attended, nursery, primary then secondary school in Lagos, worked in Lagos, and got married in Lagos. So, though I’m from Osun state, I believe I’m a Lagosian through and through.

I enjoy poetry, I actually started out as a poet. But I read a lot of books and found that they transported me to different worlds and excited my imagination in such ways that I found myself coming up with my own imagined worlds, my own imagined stories, and my own made-up adventures. That’s how I started to write.

I know a lot of writers started writing because they found a discord between the stories they read and the fact that they couldn’t find any characters that were black and like them in the stories, but I came across two things that inspired me to decide to publish my own stories.

Firstly, I read stories with black characters bearing white names and watched movies with characters having English names and I just felt, what’s wrong with our own names? I wanted my characters to carry African names so I started out by giving them African names.

Secondly, I watched a few Nollywood movies from back in the day and saw that their movies had romance happening in ways I just felt didn’t really reflect reality. Two people would just meet and next, you would see them shopping in a supermarket together and then chasing one another about under a tree or sitting in a restaurant. I felt the stories were lacking depth. I felt like more had to happen between two people before they eventually agree to date one another or even declare they had fallen in love. So I set out to create stories where there is a process to falling in love and there are characters who are three-dimensional and real. Characters who have jobs, who have friends, families, hobbies, and complex inner thoughts about why they fall in love with a particular character.

Then I had to now learn the art and process of writing. When I first started writing, I didn’t have a laptop or internet access, so I mainly wrote on higher education notes and 60 leaves notebooks.  I wrote the stories I imagined in my head and didn’t care about form or grammar or structure or plot points or point of view or title even, I just wrote because I had a story and I wanted to put it down on paper. Then I got a laptop and things began to change. I would read books and see things like speech tags and paragraphs and descriptions of scenes; and I started to adjust my writing as such.  I started to note the mistakes I was making and started to self-correct them.

I can’t talk about writing without talking about my faith. I identify as a Christian Author and I write what I enjoy reading. Stories with a hint of romance. Stories with strong characters and male leads with a good moral code. Men who treat their women right and strive to help and not tear them down.

Writing has been a challenging but rewarding experience. It started off being a hobby, something I just enjoyed doing in my spare time, then it became kind of therapeutic for whenever I was sad. Then I realized people were making a living off writing or changing lives and destinies by writing.

When I think about the authors I like, I think about them in terms of what I enjoy about their books and most especially what I can learn from them.

I started off reading foreign books before I realised that there were very many indigenous writers carving niches for themselves and churning out stories that are captivating and worth learning from.

I enjoy Christian fiction, historical romantic fiction, and fantasy.

My favorite foreign authors are;

Francine Rivers – She taught me to draw out stories from the Bible and make them mine.

Frank E Peretti – He writes Christian Fiction

Georgette Heyer – A best-selling author whose novels were popular in the 1940s. She wrote Historical Romance Fiction of the regency period and was one of the few authors that set the tone of what romantic fiction looks like today.

Phillippa Gregory- She writes historical romantic fiction and fantasy. She has a set of fictional books about the ancestors of the British royal family. The Red Queen, The White Queen, The Lady of the Rivers, and many more.

Lee Child- Author of the Jack Reacher Series. Lee has an amazing way with character and setting descriptions that I find I absolutely love.

George R Martins- The Song of Fire and Ice series. He taught me that an antagonistic character has motivations. People are not just bad, there are reasons why. No character is inherently good or bad. Give them motivation, get your readers to care about them, and don’t be afraid to kill them off.

Shonda Rhymes has come up with an amazing plethora of work, including Scandal, Grey’s Anatomy, and Bridgerton to mention a few.

My Favorite African writers

I have to start with Kiru Taye, she made the impossible possible and took romance writing by Africans about African characters to a whole new level. Much respect.

Amaka Azie, Ufuomaee, and Adesuwa Nwokedi (the Fertile Chick) – I saw their books on Okadabooks and went Wow, I can do this too.

Lola Shoneyin- I read the secret lives of Baba Segi’s wives and just fell in love with African stories all over again.

Tomi Adeyemi and Nnedi Okorafor– Children of blood and bone & Who fears death; because they write in a genre, I’m hoping to release some novels in – Fantasy.

Stanley Umezulike- He ventured into the uncharted waters of crime fiction and bravely went where few Nigerian writers have gone.

There are so many other beautiful writers out there, Emphi Baryeh, Osar Adeyemi, Glory Abah, Emem Bassey, Rosemary Okafor, Timi Waters, and Tomilola Coco Adeyemi, to mention a few.

What I’ve learnt over time is that there are different kinds of readers. Some read to escape the challenges and pressures of real life, while some just want to be entertained.

I’ve also come across serious writers who read only books they can learn something deep and meaningful from. Usually, those who read non-fiction.

The art of being a storyteller is learning the delicate act of balancing all three. The most important thing is giving your readers an experience. Don’t let your reader waste four to six hours just trying to get through a novel for the sake of reading it. Immerse them in your story such that they forget time and place. Leave them satisfied and wanting more.

I would not really say there was an inspiration, just that there was this story in my head that I wanted to tell.

I saw this scene of a daughter so angry with her father that she stood up at a table amidst all his friends and their extended family at his sixtieth birthday party and humiliated him. It also happened to be the day her older sister was introducing her fiancé to the family. My no-name character at that point didn’t care.

As I wrote, I started to ask myself certain questions. Who was this girl? What was her name? What type of family did she come from? Why was she angry? Why did she make a promise to her sister to be good on her father’s birthday and break it? Where was her mum? How does she get redeemed? So the story was born out of the process of answering these questions and Love’s Indenture came to be.

Being someone who loves God, I started to see the father as a type of God, the girl, as a typical type of man/woman on earth who is determined to go his or her own way, and the sister as a type of the Holy Spirit. Always comforting, always cheering us on, and always telling us we can do better. The man she falls in love with is a type of Jesus, who loves her despite her many faults. All he wanted to do was bring her back to her father.

I didn’t start out seeing these parallels, I just wanted to write the story as I saw it in my head. And the pieces just fell in place.

The story focused on love, grace, and redemption.

Love, because, here was a father desperate to do anything to make his daughter change her ways. There is an inheritance at stake and the danger of losing his daughter completely. He does what he does, giving her away in marriage to a mechanic; because he loves her. In reality, he found what he thought to himself was a good man who could help him achieve his goal. His daughter saw everything he did as a form of control but she didn’t know that it hurt him to give her away.

I was exploring the idea that sometimes when you decide to let go of something you are holding on so tightly to, it comes back in a form, better and greater than you could ever imagine. I was also exploring the following:

Love, from Toye’s angle, I wanted to write about love being patient and kind and selfless, not easily angered, not being rude or not being, bearing all the things that Jaiye did and said, believing that in the end, she would change.

Grace, because, he was willing to extend grace to her regardless. Of course, he was not a perfect person. He had times when she annoyed him and he ignored her, and they gave each other the Silent Treatment. But he always had her best interest at heart and that was difficult for her to believe because her father was a rich man. She believed he was doing everything he was doing for her father’s money.

Redemption, because, here was a girl who was angry at her father, given off in marriage and vowing never to forgive him. In the end, the father’s plan works out and she begins to experience life on a different scale devoid of riches and wealth which leads her down the path of redemption and restoration with her family.

I actually write because I enjoy writing and I want as many people to see what I’ve written and enjoy it too. So I would love to reach many more readers. I would also like to grow as a writer, I believe I have a lot more growing to do in the area of churning out stories that are rich and binge-worthy.

Over the next five years, I want to work on all the stories in my head and the ones halfway done on my laptop and the ones churning in the background, waiting to be released. I aim to ensure they all get published.  I have a particular five-part Fantasy novel that is in the pipeline.

In five years, I see myself in Nollywood. I want to see one of my stories made into a film or possibly hit a New York Times Bestseller. I also have this idea in my head for a medical series which I think would be really nice. I think that would be my ultimate for the now, and even after then I want to keep writing up until my eighties.

So a lot is going to happen in the next five years with Feyi Aina.

Finding time and striking a balance, that’s a question I ask every female married author I meet.

It takes a lot of time to plan a story, even when it starts with an idea in your head. You need to decide who the characters are, what their backstories are like, which point of view you are writing from and who’s point of view you are taking the story from. So when I’m at my day job or taking care of my family, I spend a lot of time in my head working these things out, playing out the scenes, and having the conversations that happen in the story, (there are always a lot of conversations in my stories I’ve noticed), and then working out the plot points and coming up with an ending. When I’ve worked all those details out, I set about writing the story.

So my writing time is typically from 11 pm to 2am when the house is nice and quiet and I can think. There is no distraction and there is no one coming to ask what they want to eat or how to do homework etc. Sometimes I don’t have that luxury cause I’ve had a long day and I’m so tired, I just fall asleep. So I look for public holidays or weekends that I don’t have much planned and write. Friday and Saturday nights are some of my favourite days to write because I’m not needing to wake up so early. This is one of the reasons why my writing process is so slow.

Yes, I’m always working on stories.

As a writer, I like the make-believe world and I live there a lot. I always make up characters and places and kingdoms.

Ayanfe, my latest release, is set in a fictional Kingdom where crimes are judged by the drinking of a herb potion. Survival means the person is innocent and death means the person is guilty. My heroine is a princess, the daughter of the King of that Kingdom. Her love interest, my hero, is the Captain of her father’s army, a man who has just returned from a brutal war. The story starts when the princess stumbles upon evidence that proves that a guard accused of killing a Chief is likely innocent. She starts to question if the laws of her land are right and if going forwards, they should abide by them. Unknown to her, there are bigger forces at play and more to what is happening in the Kingdom than meets the eye.

It’s a love story, a story about truth and about pressing on to do the right thing in the face of opposition. It’s a story I believe people will enjoy.

I would first want to apologize to my readers because there is a teaser that I have put on Okada books which I have gotten repeated calls to finish, which I have finished but was still working on editing because I wanted to fix certain plot points. It’s finally finished and has been acquired by Love Africa Press. It is coming definitely soon.

I find that my day job and family life sometimes clash and thereby make my writing process very slow. So I will work on doubling up on my writing but despite that, I’ve been in collaboration with a group of authors, and I have a story In a Christmas anthology, Hell Hath No Fury which came out in 2020 December, and another in another Christian Anthology, Healing Hearts and Hurts which came out quietly Easter, 2021. These are titles you can look out for on Amazon and Okadabooks.

Lastly, I want to say thank you to every person who has bought my book, read my book and made me believe that the thousands of hours spent pouring over my laptop late at night was all worth it.

Authors cannot be authors without the people who give up their time and hard-earned money to lose themselves in the pages of our books, so I say again, thank you to you all. I do hope I do not disappoint you at any time.