#1: Under the hood
Footpaths • Monday 16 June 2025
welcome | footways | book guides | slow reads | library
Footpaths is my journal on reading and writing at Footnotes & Tangents. Edit your notification settings here to get Footpaths in your inbox.
Last week, I completed a writing challenge to set down 1,000 words a day for 14 days. My main goal was to kick-start a habit and writing routine as we roll into summer, and it allowed me to pick up some momentum with the novel. I took a break from writing over the weekend; at the moment, looking after the kids leaves no time for work at weekends.
Today, I decided to start this writing journal. It might be an interesting exercise in accountability, record-keeping and noticing. A place where I can draw together observations, plans, and thoughts that otherwise end up scattered, and inevitably lost and forgotten.
This is the under-the-hood notebook for Footnotes & Tangents and my writing.
I spent the best part of today writing up notes for next week’s section of A Place of Greater Safety. I am conscious, as I was last year with Wolf Crawl, of the lack of time I have to do all I want with this project. I often feel that I am only scratching the surface, and the slow read seems hurried for the writer trying to capture everything. No matter. If we didn’t have the reading schedule and deadlines, none of this would get done, for the perfect is truly the enemy of the good.
Some books have just arrived: David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction, James Wood’s How Fiction Works, Richard Skinner’s Writing a Novel, and selected essays by A.S. Byatt: On Histories and Stories.
Currently listening to The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann). Started the biography of Penelope Fitzgerald by Hermione Lee.
Edit your notification settings here to get Footways in your inbox.
“the perfect is truly the enemy of the good” - I love this!