Even though I have enough to do this year without adding new projects or beginning new stories, I’m forever thinking up things to write about. Sometimes it’s a character I think would be interesting or a conflict that would be compelling and sometimes it is a setting that I believe would be cool. That’s the case with my most recent idea.

I’m really into dystopian literature and have been for a very long time. I read Animal Farm and 1984 when I was in high school and fell in love with those books. In many ways they altered my thinking. The major change I made was to abandon the idea that it would be beneficial to compel people to behave and even think in the desired way. I realized that you only end up with tyranny by doing such a thing and my mind has not changed since then. I went on to read several more and loved them. But that’s not the point.

The point is, I love dystopian literature enough to want to write it. It’s being done obviously. The Hunger Games, Divergent and more are all good stories and I’m glad they are popular. I wanted to write something a little deeper than those however. I wanted to write something that might be as significant as Orwell’s work.

I began brainstorming a world, not terribly far in the future, in which the ultimate goal is to control how people think. I believe we are doing it in more ways than one with the attack on words and language as well as with marketing and advertising. Couple that with technology that allows constant monitoring of citizenry and we already have the setting for a dystopian novel. 2018, USA.

So, I will continue to develop my dystopian series that I will likely call ’84 and incorporate a series of aspects of our world that I find most alarming. Hopefully I’ll do a little free writing to see what I come up with soon and I will post some of that here.

Until then, cheers.