Last night I wrote a longish letter and sent it off today via Express Post. Once it was sent, I knew I had no control over whether the recipient would read it or even receive it, but it was something that mattered to me to send.
I re-read the letter afterwards and immediately felt annoyed with myself — there is one factual error. When referring to my mother’s job in 1997, I wrote Tourism when I should have written Employment and Youth. This kind of mistake genuinely irritates me. I want to be accurate at all times, and in this case I can’t correct it.
My first instinct was to write another letter to point out the error, but I decided against it. I’ve been told that I’m a perfectionist in some areas of my life, and that’s probably true — though in other parts I am the most imperfect person you could possibly imagine. I’ve let this one go. I suppose it also shows how little I knew about my mother’s life back in 1997, which, unbelievably, was 29 years ago this year.
I haven’t written too many long letters like this one, although I have written a few. Each time I do, it makes me want to be a writer — an author. I’d love to sit at a computer all day or night and blurt out a story. I think it would take twice as long to edit it, but that’s half the fun.
I’d like to share with you a few ideas for books that I’ve had over the years.
I Thirst
This book is about a man who is a judge during the period of the Book of Judges in the Old Testament. He is bitten by a vampire and becomes one himself — an immortal creature with an eternal thirst for blood. Over centuries, he wanders the earth, presiding over some of history’s most famous trials: the trial of Socrates; the trial of Joan of Arc; the trials of the Spanish Inquisition; the Salem witch trials; the Nuremberg trials; the Rivonia Trial of Nelson Mandela; the trial of Ted Bundy; and the O. J. Simpson trial.
Around the time of Jesus, the Judge spends time in the orbit of Jesus and the disciples. There are whispers and rumours that he is a vampire, but no one ever confronts him directly. After the Last Supper, the Judge approaches Jesus privately and asks how he might break the curse of vampirism. Jesus tells him that the only way to be free is to drink His blood. The Judge says he cannot do that.
Jesus then embraces him.
As they hold one another, Peter — the fisherman and future first pope — watches from behind a staircase. Peter already suspects the Judge is a vampire, and the moment raises an unsettling question: has the Judge just drunk the blood of Christ? When they part, there is a small trace of blood on Jesus’s neck — enough to leave the reader wondering what really happened. Jesus tells the Judge to go. From that moment on, as the Judge continues through history presiding over trials, the Catholic Church quietly observes him.
In the present day, the Judge sits as a District Court Judge and he is bored and disillusioned with existence. Having seen everything and experienced everything, he is no longer easily interested or engaged — until he meets a young court officer.
They slowly fall in love. One day, in an anteroom between courtrooms, the court officer catches sight of the Judge’s fangs. She runs, hysterical, to the Sheriff’s Office, screaming that the judge is a vampire. Her distress is so extreme that she is detained under the Mental Health Act and admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
The Judge visits her there.
I never worked out how it ends.
I think I Thirst is a fitting title for this book, as it references the fifth of the Seven Last Words of Jesus on the cross, while also alluding to the defining experience of a vampire.
The Farm
This book is set in the present day in a large city, most likely in the United States. A period of law reform is underway, tightening already severe penalties for minor crimes. For offences such as larceny, custodial sentences have become almost automatic.
Those convicted are transported, along with others, in large trucks to a remote facility known only as the farm. People rarely return. Within the city, the farm has become a source of widespread fear.
Upon arrival, detainees are sorted according to gender, age, and other identifying biometric characteristics. Women of childbearing age are separated and subjected to forced reproductive processes. They are artificially inseminated and required to carry pregnancies to term. On the day a child is born, it is taken from the mother immediately, despite her distress. She is then connected to machines and used as a biological resource.
The farm itself operates as a grotesque extension of industrial agriculture. Human bodies are produced using advanced 3D-printing technologies combined with living materials. These bodies are brought to life through the harvesting of organs taken from the detainees.
A male journalist enters the facility undercover. From within, he observes the systematic processing of people as they are moved through sealed metal corridors. The detainees can smell the blood of those who have been killed before them and attempt to flee, but there is no escape.
While undercover, the journalist falls in love with one of the women held for reproduction. The novel becomes not only an exposure of the farm’s operations, but a comment on agriculture, consumption, and the point at which efficiency eclipses humanity.
The Canaanites
This book is set in the present day, spanning Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. It unfolds against the backdrop of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, depicting a system of apartheid and portraying Israel as committing genocide against the Palestinian people.
Alongside Israelis and Palestinians, the novel introduces an unspoken third claimant to the land: the Canaanites. The Canaanites are the indigenous peoples of the land later known as Israel, long before the emergence of the Israelites as a distinct group. In the world of the novel, Canaanites live throughout the globe, largely in secret. They exist across all levels of society, from the powerful to the marginalised, and there are quiet whispers that they are mobilising an army to liberate the Palestinians and reclaim the land of Israel from the Israelis.
In the biblical narrative, the Israelites are portrayed as violently conquering Canaan, destroying cities and displacing its inhabitants, with commands to leave “nothing that breathes.” In this story, that narrative is turned back on itself: if historical priority is used to justify modern territorial claims, then it is the Canaanites — as the earliest known inhabitants of the land — who possess the strongest claim of all.
The novel does not imagine the Canaanites mobilising an army to reclaim the land. Instead, it envisages a United Nations–mandated re-sectioning of the territory, after which the Canaanites become the controlling authority. Under this new regime, Palestinians and Canaanites are governed by civil law, while Israelis are placed under military law. The power dynamics are deliberately reversed.
Canaanite authorities enter Israeli homes in the middle of the night, detain people without charge, deny building permits, and demolish homes built out of necessity. Movement is restricted through permits, checkpoints, and segregated roads. Legal systems are divided, with different standards applied to different populations. Israeli society is subjected to invasive surveillance, economic constraint, and collective punishment — the same structural conditions long imposed on Palestinians.
This period is not intended to be permanent. After a brief but destabilising reckoning, the Canaanite authority disarms Israel, dismantles its nuclear arsenal, and initiates legal processes to hold Israeli leaders accountable for grave crimes against humanity committed against the Palestinian people. This is done without subjecting Israelis to prolonged discomfort in what they argue is their homeland.
There is no mirroring of the most extreme violence that Palestinians have endured. At no point are Israelis subjected to rape, mass killing, or the deliberate targeting of civilians. The power exercised by the Canaanites is bureaucratic, legalistic, and procedural — a cold reflection of systems rather than an eruption of brutality. The suffering imposed is structural, not sadistic.
The story ends not in triumph, but in peace. The land is no longer governed by claims of divine entitlement or historical exception. Instead, it is reordered around shared civil law, equal rights, and the acknowledgement that no modern state can claim exclusive ownership over a land with so many layers of history beneath it.
There are a few other books I’ve thought about as well, and they are considerably more juvenile than these three. They involve tardigrades, stegosauruses, and magical worlds. Even writing that now makes me want to sit down and bring those stories to life.
But the ideas I’ve just described are too dark. I don’t want to live my life down that kind of rabbit hole, and to be honest, I don’t even want to spend my time thinking about these things — judges, animal cruelty, and most of all genocide and apartheid in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories.
If I were twenty years younger, I might have made the effort. Now I just want to make stuff, work at my dream job, and travel the world.
