Argh!
It feels like ages since I’ve written a blog post. Sorry. I’ve been slack! I thought I’d give a quick update on life before I run off into the busyness of everything again.
Based on above, as you can imagine, everything has been crazy recently. I spent all of my October in Berlin studying German, writing and exploring my favourite city in the world. I am now back in Edinburgh for 2 1/2 weeks (only one week left) before I fly to the U.S. for two weeks before getting on a plane and going back home to Australia! So I am busily packing and visiting my favourite Edinburgh places and saying goodbye to everyone I love here. I will miss this city, but I am also really excited about getting home.
But in the middle of all of this, my writing is still going strong!
Sexy Capitalism
After the amazing success of my Sexy Capitalism fundraiser (which ended in September!!) I have now had the time, energy and motivation to get down the writing. I’ve been working primarily on the first couple of chapters, which will form the basis of a proposal to send to relevant publishers. This is proving to be a really useful exercise not only because it’s motivating me to write, but also because it is forcing me to think about the bigger picture of what the book will look like.
In doing so I think I have changed my structure and outline a million times, but I am finally settling on something I am happy with. My book will work in two parts; part one looking back into our history to investigate the early ways capitalism shaped our sexual and familial relationships, and then part two looking at how these early foundations play out today (in particular reference to the sexual revolution in the 1970s that many people argue changed things dramatically). This I think will be a fun progression and I’m learning a lot while trying to shape it together.
My plan is ideally to have a first draft of my proposal (including a couple of chapters) by the end of the year. I think this is still possible, but will have to work hard given the travel coming up!
Forgiveness
And I am still working on my novel! The last few months have been a bit slow with this, but working with my old writing group in Brisbane I have now set myself some targets to get the second draft done. I am hoping to be finished by the end of April. This is a full redraft, including changing from third to first person, which is a lot of work! However, with some monthly targets I am now seeing faster progress in this, which feels great.
An important shift I also think I have had in this arena has been to start to see Forgiveness more like my other work. Maybe it is because I am in editing phase, but I think I’ve been able to shift my brain space so I now see this more as a piece of writing I can chip away at whenever I want, not something I need to wait for the ‘creative juices’ to start flowing in order to work on. While this may sound like I will end up writing at bad times, it is actually working really well for me. It is giving me the space to think I can do this whenever I want, not just when I have some sense of ‘inspiration’ that I cannot articulate. This is particularly important given the stage of the book I’m at, where I’m doing more editing than writing, and therefore don’t have much space to be as creative anymore.
**
Anyway, that’s the update! It’s been busy, and I’m sorry I haven’t been publishing as much! I will probably not blog again for a few weeks given all the travel coming up. I’m hoping to use the US as a proper holiday — i.e. no work! And I have a busy week between now and then.
I’ll see you all on the other side!