Hello. Happy New Year.

I mentioned online, and on my Reasons to be Single blog, way back in late summer, that I had this idea for a sixteen-part weekly mail-out. In fact, the idea was to publish the book that I started back in 2014, a spin off of my Reasons to be Single Blog, which sadly never got commissioned — despite some early interest from publishers — but the idea has kind of spiralled into something else since then. I don’t want to write that book at the moment. I especially don’t want to write it for free.

So this mail-out is a new project, where I’ll be doing some experimental writing that is a mash up of fact and absolute fiction. At the moment I am utterly obsessed with the space between the real and the not real in theatre and literary fiction and non-fiction, the authentic and the fake, the cultural obsession with reality despite our receding — culturally, politically — from trust in experts and reliance on anything like fact (for more on this, I am working on an academic book, which I’ll point you to in the near future). I am not sure where this new project going, exactly — but I know I find it much easier to motivate myself when there are people reading as I write. I know that it is called ‘Sixteen Parts: A Love Story’, and that each entry will be about 5,000 words long. I like the idea of writing a novel length project really, really quickly, like a draft.

I want to capture the experience of being inside yourself and the world at the same time, and that sensation where your mind feels like a computer where all the tabs are open on your browser and you just keep opening more.

I want to say things that are unpalatable and true, but, at once, not true.

I think women’s writing is always most interesting when we’re experimenting with form, and I have always been obsessed with the internet and the different formal structures it has created for writing. These are under-exploited and undervalued because the book, the novel, the ‘industry’, is still and is set to remain the dominant literary form.

I don’t think Sixteen Parts is going to be funny, at least not in the way Reasons to be Single was funny. And it will definitely be more difficult to read than anything I ever wrote there, if only because of the length.

It would be massively motivating for me to start this new project with even a very tiny readership.

Please do subscribe here, the first post will go out this Monday, 8th January 2018.

Thanks for reading,

Katie.x