Working on some big projects

A couple of weeks ago TimeHop showed me a tweet from my first ever article published online. Appearing four years ago in New Matilda the article was titled Obama Goes the Chop.

I had been blogging before this and writing for FUSE Magazine, but for some reason this article stands out as the official start of me being a writer. It was the first time I realised I could do something serious with what I then considered to be a hobby. 

I have been writing a lot since on blogs and online and recently have been working on a couple of ideas for books. And here are those plans!

I’ll say here that I have always been nervous about talking about writing books. Maybe it’s because I fear I will fail, or potentially because I worry people will think my ideas are stupid. Or alternatively you may all think I’m big headed for speaking them out loud. More importantly though I think that speaking it out loud makes it real — it makes them something I have to follow through on. But that is why I need to do it — I need to force myself to follow through. 

As I said, two books. One fiction. One non-fiction. Here they are.

Fiction – Forgiveness (working title)

This is a book I have been working on for almost two years now and it is quite developed (70,000 words at the moment).

The book follows the story of two characters — John and Irene. John is a convicted murderer who has just been released after fifteen years in prison for killing his girlfriend, Alicia. Irene is Alicia’s mother. Both are dealing with John’s release and the impact the murder is having on their lives. I  wont expand too much more on the plot from there as I don’t want to write in any spoilers and things may change, but hopefully you can get the idea based on that.

As I said I am quite a way through Forgiveness and my plan now is to try and power ahead to finish my first draft. That’s probably about another 10,000 words at the moment. That means buckling down and writing. Then will start the very long editing process.

Non-fiction – Sexy Capitalism (again, a working title!)

Very much a working title Sexy Capitalism aims to be my first foray into really long-form non-fiction.

Sexy Capitalism aims to draw the links between our economics (capitalism) and sex. The book is inspired The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State from Friedrich Engels and I hope to present a modern version to this classic. I want to draw the links between how capitalism still has a major impact on our sexual and familial relations and in particular how the roots of much of our sexual oppression lay in the foundations of capitalist society. It is therefore only through challenging capitalism that we are able to challenge sexual oppression.

This book is in its early stages. I am reading, taking notes, developing ideas and starting to work on proposals for potential publishers. No real text just yet.

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So there you have it! My plans for my two books. Writing it down certainly does make me feel like I need to commit, and that is excellent. But you can also expect these books will be a running theme throughout my blog — expects lots of posts on crime books and the justice system as well as on sex, capitalism and the family. 

Like my ideas? Please help! I can always use encouragement, links to interesting articles/books or even people who are willing to chat, read and edit. Let me know.