the good part

(the feeling of writing a book)

order your copy of Chasing Fog // book next year’s Finding Your Voice retreat

A small pool of light creeps under the door and across the uneven oak floorboards of the old house. It is the end of a cloudless day and low sun sparkles on the surface of the river as a flock of jackdaws swirl around the castle, rising into the sky and then settling noisily on the castle wall, where a painted sign beside a stone archway reads ‘Honesty Bookshop.’ This is a town of books, and I have retreated here to write.

My tiny, flickering idea became a plan, a book proposal, one chapter, and then two. I am here once again in the good part — I remind myself of that, when my laptop feels too weighty to even pick up, or I find myself avoiding the stack of research books on my desk and escaping into a novel instead. This is the good part, the part when waking or sleeping I breathe my book, when writing sometimes doesn’t look like writing and yet it’s happening, all of the time. Am I living inside my ideas now, or do they still live inside of me? Suddenly the world tingles with possibility again — if I half-close my eyes, a web of connections shimmers.

I peruse the lists I have scribbled in my notebooks and the plans I have mapped with spidery pencil lines across double-page spreads. I think I know where my new book is going, but I am not yet entirely sure how we will get there, my new book and me. I am certain though, that the way is made of words, and this town of twenty three bookshops has plenty of those. I leave the window of the quiet room in the old house open, in the hope that some of the words will drift in and settle themselves onto the page.

Earlier, when the sun was still hot, I visited as many of the town’s bookshops as I could. In one particularly old and beautiful bookshop, its shelves, stairs and ceilings made of smooth dark wood, I stepped into the nature section and saw my own book displayed there, face out. Finding your book unexpectedly in a bookshop — this too is the good part, I tell myself. I inhale the scent of paper, which somehow eludes me when I am working in the little Cotswolds bookshop, but here in the town of books it seems to cling to my skin like perfume.

When all the bookshops in the town have closed their doors, wood pigeons coo and the shadows grow longer. The strings of coloured bunting that zigzag the empty streets flutter, as a midsummer hush falls over the town. I sit in the old house, my laptop on my knees, and I wait for the words to come.

{This post is from my series ‘The Feeling of Writing a Book’. You’ll find the rest of the series here.}