I realise I’ve talked about ‘the WW1 novel’ on here but never gone into detail about it. Now that Dancing with Edith (my ‘book’) is at the final stages, I’ve been working on the WW1 novel (my ‘novel’) in more depth. Particularly over the last few months as I decided to work on it as part of my Mlitt coursework.

The novel is called Edward’s Era (or EE) and it follows 5 characters before, during, and after WW1. It’s also an LGBT+ novel. It follows Enid (who is gay) and her girlfriend Clare (who is bi) and three of their friends as they participate in WW1.

Enid (who also fits under the trans umbrella), pretends to be ‘Edward’ so she can enlist as a stretcher-bearer in the war. Clare becomes a nurse. That’s all I’m going to say, but yeah. As I said in my earlier post I’ve been trying to write it for about 10 years. It’s kind of grown up with me.

Other than The Passing Bells, it’s two main inspirations are To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), in the sense that I wanted to just write a novel about ordinary life, and the first scene in EE is inspired by a scene in Mockingbird; and Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998). The later, post-war part of EE was inspired by Kay’s book in that I’d never seen its subject written about before and reading it was so validating.

Not sure how I’m going to continue to blog about EE without spoiling it, but basically I still have a bunch of research I feel I should do, so that’s taking up most of the brainspace right now. Last week I finally wrote out a basically complete plot for it, after nearly a decade. Aiming to finish a draft by November. Just hoping it won’t take me another 10 years to then complete it.

Thank you for reading and HAPPY PRIDE!