Perspective

You wait months for a blog posting, and then two come along in a week. Hopefully they'll be coming more regularly in 2018. I'll be making a major push to finish off my new novel then, especially after the end of January.

The main big news for this posting is that the novel has a new title - Perspective. As I intimated in my last post, I've been getting more and more dissatisfied, with "The Journey" as I progressed with the book. I've taken a different tack with the way I'm unveiling the back history, which means that it makes very little sense now, other then a fairly naff metaphor for Jemma's personal journey through the story.

I'm planning on splitting the novel into five main sections, titled Philosophy, Propaganda, Struggle, Revolution, and Reckoning. Those aren't exactly subtle clues to the main themes in the story. I've currently just finished the first draft of Propaganda, and have prepared the second draft of Philosophy after some excellent feedback from my son, Darren.

The last chapter of Propaganda, the longest and most important so far, was also titled Perspective. It was then that I realised that this would be a much better working title, as it reflected the themes I found I was exploring on more than one level. It'll do for now anyway.

I'm currently taking a brief break from significant writing to do some more background research, particularly given the things that are going to happen in the third section, Struggle. I recently read "Tribalism and Prejudice - The Far-Right and Lessons From History" by Simon Bell. It's only a short book, but I found it incredibly thought provoking given the state of the world right now.

I'm currently reading "The Anatomy of Fascism" by Robert O. Paxton (thanks Darren for the birthday present!), which is equally worrying although quite a different experience from Bell's book. It was originally published in 2004, so pre-dates the more recent resurgence of the far right across Europe and the USA. It's quite sobering to view the approach taken by politicians such as Trump, Farage, UKIP in general and others through the lens of Paxton's book. There are so many parallels to the tactics of the fascists in the 1920s & 1930s to get themselves into power. We're clearly not learning from history as we sleepwalk in the same direction.

As Mitchell and Webb said in their sketch, "Are we the baddies?"