Chasing Fog Book Club: Chapter 1
Sabrina's Veil
Welcome to the Chasing Fog Book Club!
Having taken you along with me on my book-writing journey, I’d now like to offer an exploration of my book —a way to make your reading experience more intimate and interactive—a kind of digital version of us sitting around a table together, holding cups of tea, and books with folded-down pages and scribbled marginalia (which are by far my favourite kind of books)!
Over the next nine months, I’m going to be looking at one chapter of my book each month. This will be a way to explore the book’s locations and themes, to allow you to connect with other readers, and to delve into the stories behind the chapters. Each chapter of the book is set in a different foggy place, looks at a different type of fog, and is guided by a different sense. I’m beginning with Chapter One, which is set in the Severn valley, features a type of fog called Sabrina’s Veil, and is guided by the sense of sight. Here I am, in the foggy woods, reading you a section of this chapter:
‘With Vision Obscured’, Chasing Fog’s opening chapter, introduces the idea of fog as an uncanny space — the strangeness in the ordinary — a weather condition with the power to transform familiar landscapes into somewhere odd and unsettling. There is danger on these pages, with a fiery accident and lives lost to the fog, but there is also art and beauty. My hope for you, the reader, is that as you read, you will start to reflect on the way you think about fog, and perhaps you will begin to consider it differently. In the writing of this chapter, I came to see my own locality in an entirely fresh way; now, when fog falls over the Severn valley, I am reminded of the myths and meanings that lie beneath, particularly the stories of Light Keeper Percy Palmer and of Sabrina, goddess of the Severn.
I’ll be answering a couple of Q&A questions each month This month’s are:
How long did the book take to write? Did you write it before you had a book deal?
I began working on the book idea for Chasing Fog in 2022. That was the summer that I searched for Percy’s grave and visited the boat graveyard at Purton. At that point, I didn’t yet have a book deal, I was researching and writing a book proposal — including a sample chapter. After I completed the book proposal, my literary agent pitched it to publishers, and I signed a contract with Simon & Schuster in early 2023. I submitted the manuscript a year later. In total, it was around two years from sharing the idea with my agent to first seeing the book in bookshop windows!
After my book was published, I was asked by Meg of the local history society to write a piece for the Thornbury parish magazine about finding Percy. You can read it, along with an update on the glowworms, here.
Writing Prompt
‘The world beyond my open window fades to white. I want the fog to drift right in, curl cool tendrils around me and encircle me like smoke.’
Have you ever felt like this?
How does weather affect your mood, and what kind of weather calls to you most strongly?
What might happen if you could beckon the weather in through your window?
I’ve created a community space for conversation about this chapter, do head over and join us:
Finally, if you’d like to hear more about fog chasing, folklore and transformation, you can listen to me walking and talking with Fergus Collins (host of BBC Countryfile’s The Plodcast) at Uley Bury — the Iron Age hill fort that features in the book’s introduction.
Listen to Laura on The BBC Plodcast.
Thank you for reading along.
Laura
Chasing Fog // buy a signed copy of Chasing Fog
{Paid subscribers, read on for bonus content including journalling questions, further reading, and a location map of key places in the chapter…}