On the New Moon, Reading Last Month’s Intention Before Writing a New One, and Being Asked to Speak as an Author — a writer’s diary entry, 10th of October

New moon at ten to six this afternoon, in the middle of the washing up, with the light still gold on the top of the hedge and nothing whatsoever to see. By the time it went properly dark a few hours later the sky over the poplars was completely empty, and I went out and stood in it for a minute. The dark of the moon. I like this night best of the whole month. Nobody looking.

So the paper and the pyramid came out after supper. The way I do it is this. Before I write anything new I get out last month’s and read it, which is the part most people skip and which is the only part that has ever taught me anything. September’s said, in my own handwriting, let it be read. Three words and a date. And I sat there this evening holding it, because I had forgotten writing it, and in the weeks since I have sent four thousand eight hundred words to nine people who read every line of it with a pencil in their hands. It got done. I wrote three words under a pyramid on a dark night in the middle of September and then I sent the thing in, and I have stopped pretending to myself that those two facts are unrelated. Writing it down puts it somewhere it can work on me.

Not all of them get fulfilled. June’s was about my mother and I put it back in the tin unticked two months running, and that is also information. The tin is an old biscuit tin and there are about forty of them in there now going back years. Orgonite pyramid on the top of the current one, moonstone beside it tonight, and the pair of them stay on the desk until the full.

And I had to think quite hard about what to write, because the obvious thing was finish the middle of the book, and I started to write that and stopped. The middle is a work problem. I know what to do about it and I have sixty-two cards on a wall telling me what to do about it, and an intention is not for the things my own hands can already reach. You put it on what you cannot do by effort alone.

What I wrote instead was: be the person in the room. Which is about December.

Because the invitation came last week. A meet-the-author evening, in a town an hour and a half from here, early December. A talk, questions afterwards, and signing books at a table. And the honest breakdown of my feelings about it is roughly eighty per cent delighted and twenty per cent thinking about that drive home in the dark on the first week of December, the N road with the fog sitting in the dips and the deer, and me on my own at half ten at night.

I said yes within the hour. The nerves can sort themselves out between now and then.

The strange part is that this is the third thing of this sort in a year. The atelier, the group, now this. Somebody at the mairie called me la romancière anglaise last month, which is wrong on one count because I am Welsh and I have given up correcting it. I came here to be nobody in particular and to write, and it turns out that if you stay somewhere long enough and keep doing the work, the place quietly decides what you are.

Twenty-three days of afternoons now and not one of them lost. Chapter eleven is finished. The middle still needs its spine but I can see where. Nothing in the sky tonight and everything to come, which is the entire point of this night, and I am going to bed.