savourites #84

silly videos | longreads about trousers | easy cake

Ideas are sneaky little things. I have spent months painfully searching for them to no avail (the hot, febrile first months of the pandemic were like this, until the notion that became Why Women Grow wandered into my head). Now I’m in the fortunate situation of having a book deadline, a podcast (or two) and a couple of columns on the go and the ideas just keep butting in anyway. There I was, awake at 5am and listening to the baby babble himself back to sleep, and a beautifully crisp chapter structure for another book appeared. The night before there was a paragraph that could sit in a short story (as In Haste readers will know, I’m toying with fiction at the moment).

I know why they’re turning up now, and it’s because I’m getting to the meaty, gnarly, potent bit of my current (non-fiction) manuscript. You know when you’re having a clear-out and you take everything out of a cupboard and then you’re just left with all the remnants of your life choices all over the place and you can’t entirely make sense of it all and it is so, so tempting to leave the room and go and embark on something else entirely but that would be disastrous, if understandable? I am there, words-wise. I have all these nuggets and ideas and avenues and I have to push through but oh, there is another thing I could put in a notebook, how nice!

For now I’m ignoring the other ideas. If they’re good enough they’ll still exist in a few months when I’m done with the chaos cupboard that is my current manuscript. There’s the potential for something clean and good, I think. For now it’s a case of turning up, doing the thing, seeing what emerges on the page. The days are growing longer - the light streams into the window in the hut and I’m reminded of how dazzling it could be in summer in here. Time to write.

Other good things this fortnight: