Gut Feeling and Neurodivergence

I started this story as a joke. I was originally going to write a funny, sexy retelling of Mary Poppins from Winnifred Banks' perspective, where a dissatisfied woman is shown a new perspective on life by an authoritative, dominant woman. It was going to be a Mary Poppins with no kids, and for adults.

What I wrote at that time was a very rough version of what I ended up with, and then I didn't think about it for about 10 years. Cut to last year, when I remembered that Mary Poppins story, I dusted it off and gave it a read, and found myself strongly relating to Winnie, the lead character. Something about her inner voice felt very familiar and comfortable, even when Winnie herself rarely was.

The more I dialed into her character, the more I realized just how much of myself I was putting into her. Mostly her eccentricities. The seemingly peculiar traits she has when it comes to perceiving and interacting with the world around her. As I wrote Winnie, I found myself becoming increasingly more honest about how I think. I stopped writing Winnie's voice as a story and started writing it more like a diary. My own diary. None of the events are true (well, mostly), but the feelings, stressors, and anxiety are all mine.

While Winnie's life and my life are very different, and Winnie certainly has her own challenges that have nothing to do with my experience and are entirely fictional, how she handles those challenges are 100% Joe. The way she can't eat food that was on a plate with a pickle. How she needs the sanctuary of music to escape the noise of the world. The way sounds can scrape across her mind like knives on a chalkboard, or taste like cotton candy. That feeling of never knowing if someone is mad at you or not, and obsessing about it. All of these things Winnie deals with, and I talk about them. Winnie talks about them.

Winnie doesn't know that she's autistic. I don't know for certain that I am, and while I have many of the qualities that manifest in people on the spectrum, I've also been afraid to be formally tested. I don't want an answer, one way or the other. Not yet, anyway. Winnie doesn't even realize she might be, so I side-step writing that one a bit. For now.

What I'm getting at is that drafting this book was an extremely vulnerable undertaking. I care very much about Winnie and Deborah and their relationship. I never set out to talk about this subject, certainly not in an "erotica" story, if it even is that anymore. It's certainly a sexual story, and I don't shy away from that fact, but as I went through my rewrites, it became more of a story about one woman's later-in-life sexual awakening through the lens of her neurodivergence, than a straight-up smut story.

I do feel like there's a place for this kind of story. It's the sort of story I'd want to read, both as a fan of fiction and as a person who shares most of Winnie's traits. It feels important to me to embrace this part of my identity in my writing. It feels like the right time, and I am excited to see what my output looks like going forward. If this is a space where I can set up house and live for a while, I'm happy to do it.

A bit of housekeeping. I've decided to push the release of Gut Feeling out until the end of April. I think this book is really good, and I want to get proper editing and proofreading done before I release it. I'd also like to try to get the audiobook done for the same release date. So April 30th now.

Okay, that's it for now! Thanks for sticking with me while I unloaded all that,

Joe

PS: For a list of content warnings for Gut Feeling, click here