Hello!

Two things this week. Firstly, a little nugget of wisdom from Oliver Burkeman, from his latest book Four Thousand Weeks, which I found remarkably helpful (and also quite obvious when you think about it...) and also news on my next novel, which will be coming out in May.

Miners is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In our saturated society, we have to be picky. There is no other way to live. Oliver Burkeman maintains that it is an error to 'clear the decks' and get all the nitty gritty jobs out of the way before attempting to settle down to the important work because one of these things will happen: a) you will run out of time, b) you will get distracted, c) you will realise that the nitty gritty will expand into however much time you allocate it, and will, in fact, take up all the time.

Although we mean well when we say clear the decks, we have to understand that they will never be cleared. There will never be an end to the mundane or irritating jobs that throw themselves into our line of vision on a daily basis. Burkeman says:

'And so, like the dutiful and efficient worker I was, I'd put my energy into clearing the decks...only to discover that the decks filled up overnight again anyway. One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about most.'

No, Burkeman says, the key to doing important work is to do it first. Make it the priority. Put your blinkers on. Let washing up and laundry fall by the wayside. That will get done later. If you want to do the work, you must prioritise it above all else. Make it the first thing you do. Allocate time to it. Do not give that time away to anyone else either. (You can always meet a friend for coffee after you have done the important thing!)

It's so obvious when you think about it, but all of us have this Zen picture in our minds of sitting down to work in a perfectly tidy house, with all the laundry done, everything beautifully clean, a swirl of steam ascending from our fresh coffee.

Don’t give in to the lie! Create, instead, with desperation, in exhaustion, and with absolute clarity that this creative endeavour is worth your time.

I say all this to myself too, who is currently putting off writing Murmuration 2, because my head won't settle to the task. Perhaps I'll take Burkeman's words on board this week. It's a fascinating read – go and check it out.

Can you make one small step to prioritising your creative work this week?

This week I get to tell you about Christopher, Running which is exciting! It is my new novel, which will be coming out in May. It is literary fiction and is totally different to Murmuration! (Well I say that, but long journeys on foot and static caravans feature in both!) If you loved Lanny, Sorrow and Bliss, and Of Mice and Men, then I think you’ll like this.

Read on for a flavour of the book:

What if you do something so bad that there is no way back from it?

How do you keep on living?

Christopher and Cassie are the best of friends but when a tragic accident separates them for good, Christopher can't move on, and his adult life becomes a cycle of breakdowns and recoveries. Years later, he meets Alice. They fall into an unusual relationship and end up living together after Christopher's mother dies. When Alice's daughter turns seven, she reminds Christopher painfully of the friend he once lost.

But when the voice in his head tells him to do the unthinkable, Christopher must make his choice. And when he realises that he has betrayed the trust of the ones he loves most in the world, he goes on the run.

Can Christopher forgive himself for the past and let himself live again?

Christopher, Running took even longer to write than Murmuration! I began to have ideas for this book at secondary school, when I started writing about my grandparents' house and the wild fens. It felt like a fairytale somehow, and all the tales I heard whenever we were there delighted my writer's mind. I buried them down and they turned into compost over the years. When I started digging as a writer, they were the first things to come up.

I first wrote the novel on my MA (2006-2008), and it felt like torture because I didn't realise that to write a novel, your characters actually had to do something about the problems in their lives, not just sit about like miserable fools. I finally realised this when I read Save the Cat, during my WriteMentor mentorship in 2021. After getting Murmuration out of my system, I turned my attention back to my beloved first novel, which was a total mess.

I ripped it to bits again and reassembled it, finally, into a novel that I love. As you can probably tell, it is a very special book to me. I will be telling you more about it over the next few months as we lead up to the publication, and I really hope you will love it too!

I am currently awaiting the final edits and the cover design is underway too which is all very exciting - I will share more when I can!

Thanks so much for reading Miners, and feel free to forward it on to anyone you think may like it.

Elisabeth x

PS - Don't forget, you can preorder The Ways in Which We Are Like Birds, my latest poetry collection here. It comes out on March 20th.

Miners is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.