On the Hunter’s Moon, Releasing the Need to Be Finished Before Being Seen, and Deciding to Serialise a Novel — a writer’s diary entry, 26th of October

The Hunter’s Moon came up on Sunday evening over the stubble. Enormous. Orange. Sitting right down on the horizon like something being lifted up out of the ground. I watched the whole of it from the top of the lane with my coat thrown over my nightdress and I didn’t care who saw me.

The clocks had gone back that morning, so it’s properly dark at six now, and then the full moon turns up on the same weekend to make up the difference. I love that. It always feels to me as though the year knows exactly what it’s doing.

I was awake again at five and it was still going, low in the west, gone silver and ordinary, and I made tea and stood at the window with it rather than go back to bed.

So the paper came out from under the pyramid. Be the person in the room, I’d written on the tenth. It isn’t due until December, so it goes back in the tin with the date on it and no tick yet. But the poster arrived in the middle of this cycle with my face on it, and I’d said yes to the whole thing within an hour of being asked, and those are not unconnected to three words I put under a crystal on a dark night. That is how it works. You name the thing you’re becoming and then you catch yourself doing it before you’ve quite agreed to it.

What I gave over to the full moon instead was the idea that the book has to be finished and perfect before anybody is allowed to see a word of it. Said out loud, in the lane, to a moon the size of a dinner plate.

And then I spent the entire weekend doing something about it, which is the part I’m still a bit startled by.

I’m going to serialise the novel. Weekly, a piece at a time, each chapter split in two because they run long, about two and a half thousand words an instalment. The first few go out free. After that there’s a subscription, and I’m recording myself reading them aloud, and there’ll be other things alongside for the people who come with me.

I’m not going to say where, and the name on it is not the name at the top of this page, and that’s deliberate and it’s staying that way.

Here’s the real reason I’ve done it. Sitting down was never the problem. I can do the afternoons and I’ve proved it, every single one since the third of October. The problem is letting go of the thing at the end.

A chapter that’s due to a person who is waiting for it on a Thursday goes out on Thursday. A chapter that’s only due to me gets rewritten four times, and then a fifth, and then it goes in a drawer for the winter and I tell myself it’s resting. I have never once in my life missed a deadline that somebody else set me. Not once. And I have missed very nearly every single one I ever set for myself. I know this about myself now and there’s no point pretending otherwise.

So I’ve gone and made the deadline real. I’ve handed it to strangers. And now I can’t get it back.

Two cards this morning, which happens sometimes when they stick together and I take it as emphasis. Decisions, which asks for patience to let events line up as they need to. And Evolution, which asks to welcome change in uplifting and surprising ways and to trust the process. I sat and looked at the pair of them for a long time with my tea going cold, because I had just that weekend committed myself to turning up every single week for a year, in public, under a different name, with absolutely no idea whether anybody will come.

Fine. The moon’s past the full and starting down, the fire is lit, there are rugs on the floor and a deadline on Thursday.

Carry on.