A bold claim
And a sneak peak
I’m going to let you into a little secret.
Something I haven’t really shared with anyone else outside of my immediate family but it is something that finally, after years of saying I am going to do it - I really am.
This year - in 2025 - I am going to write a book.
As a child I would spend hours writing stories and when I wasn’t writing stories I was reading them - and fondly imagining myself as Jo from Little Women. Wrapped in a blanket in my garret eating apples and writing. I wasn’t entirely sure what a garret was but I definitely liked the idea of it.
Fast forward a few years and I have had ‘write a book’ on my list of yearly intentions for a ridiculous number of years. But enough is enough and in the immortal words of Maureen Lipman “If not now, then when?”
2025 is the year and so when
launched her (free) 12 Chapters Club I signed up quicker than you can say ‘fetch my quill’
Most of my writing here on Substack is free to all and my Friday newsletter is and always will be free. In addition for those members of my paid community here I offer extra content. Some of my older posts are also paywalled - but in case you have missed them and would like to catch up I have removed the paywall on a few of them for the next week or so. Previous paid posts have included:
A tale of a curious cat
This is the tale of a curious cat. A bold cat. A cat that gives precisely zero f*cks. A cat that I hope will get your week off to a flying start, in the way that cats can often speak to our souls.
When it's time to sit on your hands
When astronauts and people in other mission critical professions are being trained there is an exercise they use called ‘Sit on your hands’. In short they are presented with a critical systems failure and asked to solve it. The first thing they are trained to do is to estimate the time they have available before people wil…
My intention with my writing is that in 2026 I will be ready to publish my first book. It’s knitting-related obviously and will be a collection of anecdotes much like my writing here - connected to knitting (let’s call it knitting adjacent) but also discussing how it intersects with everyday life. There will also be a few simple knitting patterns to accompany the book - a kind of knitters almanac if you will (with all due credit and respect to Elizabeth Zimmerman who I couldn’t possibly hope to emulate - but I’ll give it a go).
Members of my paid community here will be the first to read snippets of this material as I’m going along, so as with the other extra content they will be published behind the paywall. I’m including a snippet from my first chapter below which will hopefully give you a flavour of what I am aiming for. Not to mention the fact that announcing this bold claim to the world will stop me from chickening out as I have so many times before.
Onward!