Two year Substack birthday....

*celebrations,commiserations, reflections

Photo: My cat Stevie WonderNiks expressing here my mixed feelings about the Substack journey.

Dear Reader,

This week it was my second birthday on here so here’s a little birthday honouring, reflective mile-stone post. Here’s how and why I began this thing…(full post here)

So I began in order to write more and more regularly. I was at the time, also, going through a Julia Cameron Morning Pages phase which also fuelled me to put work out into the world.

Here’s a bit on my original idea for the naming of this newsletter….(full exploration here)

As the rest of the above piece explores Chaotic Woman was not to be and I instead landed on After the Fact because I like everyday phrases (and soundbites) and because it seems to me to quite neatly sum up, albeit in a very basic and essential way, what writing is - working stuff out after the fact, stuff that seemed like total chaos, or even like total meaningless nonsense at the time gains clarity through writing after said event.

So here I am after two years and yes this space has served me well in a myriad of ways - I've cemented that regular writing practice into my life, discovered some wonderful new (to me) writers (including Kim Stallwood, If Not Paris, Noted, Coco Wilde,

John Grindrod

and

Lucy

to name but a few), have established a sort of diary of changing tastes, found some fantastic community from you dear readers (thank you 🙏*) and yet despite all this good stuff this also feels accurate…

Tim Lott is far more advanced than I in every (literary) sense so while I know we are writing from very different places and very different positions status-wise this Note still rang true**. (This is not to say that Substack is negative for all/other writers, for many it works extremely well and enhances rather than detracts from their - other- writing, and yet as time has gone on it feels less positive for me personally.)

Alas, my two-year-old-toddler conclusion: I intend to stay on here for sure and for all the meaningful reasons inventoried above but I will post less frequently and so, I believe, will write more privately, (my novella is progressing well FYI 🥳). And in the meantime there’s plenty in the archives for those (handful of readers) absolutely desperate to read more now!

See you anon and thank you as always for reading and for supporting my writing, I do appreciate you.

Love,

Emma

x o x o

*a special shout out to paid subscribers and those who have shared AtF a lot 🙏.

**I am not an award-winning writer with the pressure of 2.5K subscribers!