[COLLABORATION] True crime UK memoir needs a hungry ghostwriter. Proper story, no budget, but this one's got weight.
I'm gonna start off by being straight with you..
I'm not a writer. I'm a forty-one year old geezer (and no, that doesn't mean old in the UK) from Derby who somehow made it out the other side of something that most people don't. I've got a story that starts in a smack den in my childhood area of Chaddesden, and ends with my half-brother turning up at my door covered in the blood of my ex-girlfriend. Twenty-three stab wounds worth of it. Still clutching the knife.
Everything in between? Fourteen to twenty-eight. Sleeping rough. Running from the police across Cornwall in the pitch black. A girl I loved, the pair of us living in a plastic wardrobe in the sand dunes of Mablethorpe. Heroin dens. Burglaries. A prediction that came true in exactly seven days. Courts in three different counties. A night standing on a bridge above Penzance train tracks watching a helicopter hunt for us, half-terrified, half-disbelieving we'd got away again.
And then, somehow, a baby girl who saved my life without knowing she was doing it.
I've got a rough draft. It's raw, it's very honest, and it sounds like Derby because it is Derby. The voice is mine and I want it to stay that way. What it needs is someone who can shape it. Someone who understands the language, the culture, the way people actually talk on the estates, in the doss houses, in the police cells of the East Midlands. The kind of life that doesn't make the papers until someone ends up dead.
Here's the honest part: there's no upfront money. What I'm offering is co-authorship, your name on the cover alongside mine, on a story I genuinely believe has real commercial legs. True crime memoir, UK-based, with a murder conviction at its heart and a redemption arc that doesn't tie up neatly with a bow, because real life doesn't do that.. does it!?
I'm not looking for someone chasing a paycheque. I'm looking for someone who reads this and thinks I need to be involved in that. Someone unproven who wants to do something real with something that has actual weight. Someone who understands this isn't a vanity project. It's a story about what happens to the kids who fall through every crack there is, and how some of them, against all the odds, find their way back.
If that's you, if you've got the craft, the hunger, and you're not afraid of ugly and honest, drop me a message. Tell me about yourself. Send me something you've written. Tell me why this.
The draft exists. The story is real. It just needs the right hands on it.
(Derby / East Midlands connection preferred but not essential. You just need to get it.)