You can find my Beatles RPF series here on AO3. In an attempt to bridle AI and data scraping, my work is only available to registered users of the Archive.
Girl is a collection of self-contained short stories all set in the Beatles & John Lennon universe. I'd suggest to read them in the order in which they were published, as I got more and more attached to the girl as the series progressed.
Most of the stories have an explicit rating but it's never porn without plot
and I'm tagging everything accordingly.
Many thanks to all of you who have bookmarked and read my stories, left kudos and even commented. This is for you: 💕
story index
resources
My main resource for my writing are books. I've read (or at least skimmed through) most of the popular Beatles books out there.
I take everything with a grain of salt; I don't believe that anyone knows the absolute truth or has all the facts straight...but that's alright with me. I'm not a historian and I do enjoy reading all kinds of anecdotes and tidbits and fitting all those pieces together like a puzzle.
The more I read, the more I get a sense of what is possibly true and what's most likely fiction.
And anyway, at the end of the day, my John is a fictional character as well, no matter how accurate I aim to be in my writing.
Since the early Beatles' days are my personal favourite, my most consulted book is Mark Lewisohn's Tune In.
For the touring years, I enjoyed Larry Kane's Ticket to Ride and When They Were Boys as well as Ivor Davis' Beatles and Me on Tour.
As for books about John specifically, the most important one is of course Cynthia Lennon's A Twist of Lennon / John. I also like Larry Kane's Lennon Revealed and Being John Lennon by Ray Connelly.
More on the gossipy side, but nonetheless entertaining, are Pauline Sutcliffe's Stuart Sutcliffe & His Lonely Hearts Club Band, Tony Bramwell's Magical Mystery Tours, Lives of John Lennon by Albert Goldman, Lennon in America by Geoffrey Giuliano and my two favourites: Pete Shotton's Beatles, Lennon and Me and Living on Borrowed Time by Fred Seaman.
Of course it's best to hear it from the lads themselves, so The Beatles by Hunter Davies, The Beatles' Anthology and the 2024 All You Need Is Love by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, the addendum to the infamous The Love You Make.
Very good books about The Beatles, Beatle People and the swinging 60s scene are Margaret Hunt's Yesterday - Memories of a Beatles Fan, Harriet Vyner's Groovy Bob and Hippie Hippie Shake by Richard Neville.
To get a better understanding of how John thinks and talks, I recommend reading - and if possible listening to - interviews, even the made up ones published in 60s teen magazines.
inspiration
The main inspiration for my writing are The Beatles themselves.
Their story is endlessly fascinating to me and at least partly fits the definition of a hero's journey as depicted in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
I just wish for John the last stage of the monomyth, the Freedom to Live
, would not have been so cruelly cut short.
As for the girl, she's meant to be a somewhat typical young woman who grew up in the 50s and 60s. She is an amalgation of all the characters and their experiences and struggles I've read about in books - coincidentally all the books the girl has read as well - and encountered in TV shows and films.
My all-time favourite TV drama is Mad Men and the girl is partly inspired by both Don Draper and Peggy Olson albeit I sometimes think of her as a curious mix between Betty and Veronica from Riverdale, too.
I'm also particularly fond of the story telling in The Crown, how there's oftentimes an overarching theme which connects the different subplots with each other.
And maybe there's a vague idea for a little something about Princess Margaret, Lord Snowden, John and the girl hidden in the depth of my mind.
John and the girl's relationship is not meant to be ideal - after all it is a story loosely based on true events - and yet the girl is my idea of an ideal partner for John. At least for a while.
So, in a way, Girl is not only a love story about John and the girl but also a whimsical declaration of love from me to John Lennon for all the joice and solace he's been giving me over the years.
Will it work out in the end? To quote Paul in Get Back, Who knows, Yoko?
We'll see, won't we?