beginnings

on starting new things

Hello! savour members can now listen to the audio narration of these letters, simply scroll down beneath the paywall.

It always starts this way: weeks, more often months, of prevarication before I sit down and do the thing. The proposal for Rootbound: Rewilding a Life lay in the metaphorical closed drawer that is my Google Drive for nine months before I took it out and confronted its existence. Why Women Grow only started realistically appearing on the page once I’d renovated the flat. Hark had possibly the longest gestation, more than a year awash in self-doubt and procrastination; I filed it a neat three years after the idea first arrived.

Books do funny things to time. People who don’t write them are always amazed by how long it takes to get them onto the shelves, all the layers of process and polishing and preparation - as much to make the book ready for the wider world as to prepare the author for the realisation that it’s not really hers anymore. Nevertheless, suggest that you’re working on another one three years after you started the last and people are faintly horrified. “Already?!” they respond, suggesting you should go on holiday or something. But there are ideas to play with and bills to pay (among the large, the littler: for pastries, Lido memberships and barre classes, all the things I indulge in while supposedly working so hard). And so here we are.