On Submitting a First Chapter to the Writers’ Group, the Fear of Being Read Slowly, and the Work That Came After — a writer’s diary entry, 11th of September

Sent it. Eleven forty this morning, Friday, chapter one attached, four thousand eight hundred words of it, subject line as flat as I could make it. Then I sat looking at the sent folder like a woman who has just posted a letter she would quite like back.

The plan had been to read it aloud at the meeting. That was the arrangement in my head for weeks and I had more or less made my peace with it. Then the group changed how we do submissions, sensibly, because reading aloud means everyone nods along and says lovely things about your voice and nobody gives you anything useful. So now the piece goes round beforehand and everybody reads it at home with a pencil, and we discuss it at the meeting after next. A fortnight.

A fortnight of nine people I know reading it slowly, in their own kitchens, able to go back over a paragraph twice. That is worse. I had not understood until this morning that what I actually wanted was the protection of my own voice carrying it along, the little bit of performance that stops anyone looking too closely.

Somebody will tell me that was brave. Brave is a word other people use afterwards. From the inside it was a woman in a cardigan with a cold cup of tea, hovering over a button, doing the sums about how much worse it would be to be the person who withdrew it. I pressed send on the second attempt, went out to the woodshed for no reason at all, came back in and made the tea again.

And here is the thing I did not expect. I went back to the desk at two and did three good hours on chapter eleven, which has been the sticking point since the wall went up. The one that used to be four chapters wearing the same coat. It turns out that letting somebody else have the first one takes it off my hands entirely, and the hands are then free.

New moon this morning, in the small hours, so there is nothing up there at all tonight. I have made this observation before in July and I am not going to make a great deal of it twice. But I did notice it, and I did notice what I had done on the day of it, and I am allowing myself to think that is a decent sort of coincidence to have.

Two weeks. I will not be looking at that chapter again before then, and I have asked my inner busybody to hold that line.