I don’t know if I should admit this in a public space on the internet, but I’m not a very good writer. By that I mean I’m not good at doing writing on a reliable or predictable schedule; whatever the quality of the work that gets published in the end, I’m terrible at the literal action of sitting and writing. If I had treated the job I used to have in a shop the way I do this job of putting words on a screen I would have been sacked on day two when I didn’t show up for my shift, refused to answer the boss’s calls and set fire to my uniform.

Yet in different ways, writing has been my job for over a decade now. I have published many articles and a book — you’re reading this now, in all likelihood, because you once came across something I wrote and enjoyed it. How is this compatible with my bad employee approach to doing the work, you might wonder. The answer comes in two parts: the writing I do happens in squeezed pockets of time usually when I can no longer postpone the obligation, and for a long time my primary job was as an editor of other people’s words rather than as a writer of my own.

I’ll let you in on the awful secret of how I wrote my first book. I had a year to do it and 85,000 words to write. I treated it like a giant article, by which I mean I spent 75 per cent of the time researching and interviewing and then arrived at the last three months with precisely zero publishable words on the page. I do not recommend this: the psychological impact of being so close to the deadline and having to stare at a blank screen where your book should be is extremely denting to one’s confidence.

I hadn’t written up any of my notes from the research period into recognisable sentences, and all of my interviews had been transcribed but not digested. I had the outline that I’d used to sell the book, but no idea if this was going to work in practice. With no better plan, I just started at the beginning. I wrote the book through in the order you can now read it, starting at page one and ending exactly 85,001 words later. This is also how I write articles — I have to write them as if I’m the reader, for some reason I can’t fathom.

I had a spreadsheet titled “Book ARGH” into which I entered each day’s word count next to the date. It then calculated the running total for the manuscript, divided it by the number of days left until the deadline, and thus told me how many words I needed to write on each remaining day to make it to the finish. I found the terror this inspired very motivating. After a bad day when I only put 250 new words into the document, the required daily word rate would shoot up over 2,000; a good day could push it down below 1,000.

I will discreetly draw a veil over how much of a complete mess I was during the 84 days in which I wrote like this. Suffice to say, when I mentioned to my husband that I was starting work on a new book idea, his main feedback was “maybe you could cry less this time”. That gave me a jolt and got me thinking: why do I do it like this? I like this profession, I’ve made it work for me, yet I’m so very terrible at putting in the hours. There has to be a better way to write.

There’s that quote, often misattributed to Dorothy Parker, that goes “I hate to write, but I love having written”. I’ve believed in that for a long time — that the process has to be awful so that I can arrive at the blissful feeling of a deadline met. And I’ve never had cause to question this, because I always get there somehow. I didn’t exactly love the all nighters and the stressful crunch periods, but I thought that was just how I worked. I needed the adrenaline to flush out the inspiration.

That is, until the last few months. Around the first anniversary of going into lockdown last March, I suddenly lost two skills at the same time: the ability to get a full night’s sleep, and my much-honed capacity to pull the words out of the bag at the last minute. It was not dissimilar to the disbelieving feeling you get when convalescing from an illness. I used to be able to walk up this hill without getting out of breath, so why am I having to sit down every ten steps? The environment looks the same but the way you inhabit it is utterly changed.

I’ve been quiet on this newsletter since this March while I’ve been grappling with this inability to write as I always have done in the past. I’ve never been much of a consumer of “writing advice” content, but I’ve been devouring the stuff recently as I’ve been trying to rebuild my process and learn to view the act of writing as worthwhile rather than just prizing the results. A few selected highlights:

This interview with William Boyd, in which he tells the story of how very early in his career he pitched a “completed” novel to a publisher that he had not actually written, and then wrote it in three months after they accepted it while telling his editor that he was “retyping it”. I feel like this is a lie that worked better in the 1980s, but it does still sound like something I would do. He now writes every day and plans out his time and plots extensively, which he finds to be a more sustainable and less anxiety inducing habit.This interview with John Swartzwelder, which has been widely shared already but contains such a gem of a paragraph that I’m going to repeat it again here:Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it.This article by Amitava Kumar about why ticking off 150 words a day helped him correct a problem with how he felt he was spending his time:Too often I spent my days wanting to write and not writing. Again and again, I would note in my journal, “I did not write today.” The idea that this was how I was going to spend my life filled me with despair.This interview with Caroline O’Donoghue, in which she eloquently explains how to write a novel instead of just talking about writing a novel. Unfortunately, it involves getting up early.

I’ve always been of the opinion that devoting time to reading about how to write is just a form of procrastination from writing itself, but I was wrong – all of these perspectives and more have really helped me get back on the metaphorical horse after my fall. I’ve realised that I can’t just wait for inspiration to strike when I’m under pressure, nor can I rely on writing anything good while staying up all night any longer. I have to be my own crappy little elf, turning up each day to put down the bad words so that the next day I can make them better.

Here are a few things I’m doing now that have really helped me with this. Since I’ve started these practices, I’ve filed some long overdue essays, am no longer so behind on podcast scripts, and actually completed the book proposal I’ve been working on for over a year. It’s very irritating to find that the “get up early and get on with it” people were right all along, but life is full of such disappointments.

I did the two-week #1000wordsofsummer challenge run by writer Jami Attenberg. I wrote 1,000 words each day before moving on to any of my other work, and the impact was quite astonishing — no matter what other frustrations and failures occurred during the day, I had already made measurable progress towards finishing something.I’ve been posting more on my Instagram about the difficulties I’ve had with writing and people have been very kind, which has made me feel like less of a secret failure. I am historically terrible at all forms of self promotion, but am trying to get over this.I started a morning accountability writing Zoom. It’s nothing fancy — after a very quick hello, we all keep our videos off and mute ourselves before checking back in an hour later, but I’ve found having made the appointment with other people to show up for an hour and get some writing done is really effective. If you’d like to join me to do this at 9am BST on weekdays, fill out this form and I’ll send you periodic updates about when it’s happening and what link you’ll need. If my schedule doesn’t work for you then you might want to look for an existing session in your timezone — writers’ workshops and groups tend to run them — or start your own.I do calendar blocking now. After encountering this term a lot I finally learned what it is properly from this video by Hannah Witton. I’ve found that the process of allocating time each day in my calendar in advance for all the different tasks I want to do has been very helpful in reducing my anxiety about having too much to do and not enough time to do it in. The writing Zoom is a fixed and recurring appointment, for instance, and I’ve also been making space properly for other writing work like Shedunnit scripts rather than just expecting it to magically happen in between all my admin.

I don’t feel like I’m in any position to offer advice about writing — this is just what has helped me out of a major slump and I’m mostly writing it out now because putting it down like this helps me to clarify what I’m trying to do. I’m still very much working on becoming a better writer who can show up for her job properly.

If any of what I’ve listed above prompts any useful ideas or techniques for you, I’m glad, and if you’re afflicted with any or all of the problems I’ve described I hope to see you at a writing Zoom sometime soon. Your advice and experiences will be very welcome; just hit reply on this email to tell me about something, ask me a question or make a suggestion about a future topic you’d like me to write about.

I hope to be more regular with this newsletter now — this is another horse that I’m getting back on. I’ve been doing it on and off for nearly seven years, and the format and content has changed a lot in that time, so I won’t be offended if you unsubscribe because this iteration isn’t for you.

Until next time,

Caroline

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: get my article and podcast recommendations in The Browser, listen to my murder mystery podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

I was having a conversation the other day about what I’m working on at the moment and how I constantly feel like I’ve almost finished everything but never quite arriving at that point. This came up because my husband and I were planning out the next few months, during which time we want to take some time off to spend with friends and family.

I was being unhelpful: because I’m a freelancer, I don’t have holiday days that I can book like a regular employee, and thus I’ve made working all the time my default. I fear that if I stop for a while the people I write and edit for will make other arrangements and I won’t have any work to come back to. I’d just made this point for the third time when G said something that stopped me in my tracks:

“What if you did less work?”

What if I did less work. It shouldn’t be such a revolutionary thought, but somehow it is. And I’m not the only one to be considering it — after over a year of awful pandemic working conditions, people are quitting jobs in record numbers and demanding the right to continue working flexibly from home. My job has been mercifully unaffected by the numerous lockdowns, but that doesn’t mean I can’t redesign it now that the world has changed.

There are, of course, practical considerations. Financial ones, mainly, but also childcare plus questions of insurance and benefits if you live somewhere where that comes linked to a job. But regardless of your situation, as a prompt for thinking harder about how you spend your time I recommend this question.

I’m too prone to only dabbling around the edges of this issue. I can take a week off, I think, if I do all the work I would have done then beforehand and schedule it all so nobody knows I’m gone. I accept the fact that I will have to work twice as hard when I come back, instead of tackling the root cause of this unpleasant transaction I do with my past and future self. What if… I just didn’t do that work, ever?

In that Amitava Kumar piece about writing I linked to last week, he includes that famous Annie Dillard line: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I spent most of yesterday worrying about how much work I still have to do before the end of the month. I’m not sure I want a lifetime of that.

My morning accountability Zoom for getting writing done continues. If you’d like to join me to do this at 9am BST on weekdays, fill out this form and I’ll send you periodic updates about when it’s happening and what link you’ll need.

The algorithm sent me to this video from ten years ago the other day, an acoustic version of the smash pop hit “We Are Young” by the band Fun. and Janelle Monáe.

It’s been watched over 92 million times since it was first posted in 2011, so I’m certainly not the first person to connect with it. I think it’s so interesting musically, though, which is why I’m pointing you to it now.

Nate Ruess and Janelle Monáe are both solo singers, used to being the only vocalist on a stage, and yet in this arrangement they are doing the unusual thing of working very hard to make their voices sound indistinguishable. Not every vocalist can do this — in choral music, we talk about “the blend” constantly and those with more soloistic tendencies have to work on joining the corporate voice instead of standing out above it. I am weirdly good at blending, even though I’m nothing special as a singer on my own, and I’ve always considered this to be because my personality inclines this way anyway.

(I really miss choir, which is still prohibited under the UK’s current rules. This is probably why I’m doing unsolicited musical analysis of random YouTube videos.)

You can tell that Nate and Janelle are loving their togetherness in this version, though, because they keep looking at each other and smiling every time they execute a perfectly synchronised run or vocal tic. When Janelle finally takes a verse on her own, and then sings a later chorus in canon instead of unison, it’s really shocking, because we’ve become so used to hearing her as part of that joint voice. For a song like this that is more about that one anthemic melody rather than complex harmony, this presentation really, really works.

I also just really like the story of “We Are Young”, which was a huge hit for Fun. that topped charts and won awards. Not that long after this big success, rather than trying to ride the wave into selling more singles and playing that one song at every gig for the rest of their lives, the band went on indefinite hiatus. Jack Antonoff is now a bigtime producer of other people’s music, and all the members have put out their own stuff. It’s interesting, I think, to examine the reasons why people don’t choose to capitalise at times when the market system tells them they should.

Related: I enjoyed this episode of the Switched On Pop podcast about the battle currently going on over how songwriters are paid for their work.

I’m on this week’s episode of The Media Podcast, talking about media news from the latest big podcast acquisition to the neverending privatisation of Channel 4. You can listen to that here or your favourite podcast app.

I was also on the BBC’s Podcast Radio Hour recently, talking about my favourite detective podcasts and interviewing a couple of the people who make them. That’s available here or in the BBC Sounds app (which I believe is finally available to download outside the UK, and is worth it mainly to have easy access at all times to Peter Wimsey radio adaptations).

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: get my article and podcast recommendations in The Browser, listen to my murder mystery podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

I’m in an awkward limbo phase and I don’t like it at all. My Next Big Writing Project™ is temporarily out of my hands in a way that I find very uncomfortable and I don’t quite know what to do with myself. The last few months have been a blur of routine: get up, hammer away at the draft until I hit a thousand new words, then close it and try not to feel too overwhelmed with guilt while I do all the other work I ignored in the meantime. Now there’s a blank space in my morning where all that effort used to be, and it’s making me do strange things like create new documents titled MY BRILLIANT NOVEL and fill the page with bullet points for scenes I have no idea how to write.

It’s hard not to draw parallels between this enforced yet temporary cessation of activity and the wider situation in the world, of course. Where I live in the UK, cases are going up at an alarming rate yet we’re told that all the summer reopening plans are still on. It’s like the few moments in the dark on stage before the curtain goes up. Nobody really knows what’s going to happen and we’re all just breathing in the dusty backstage air together, hoping that we can put on a good show.

After months of not really sleeping, I’m being put through a strict regimen aimed at minimising nighttime anxiety by a cheery-yet-strict “wellbeing coach” at my doctor’s surgery. I may only sleep between midnight and 6.30am; I may not take naps; and I’m not allowed to work after 6pm. The principles underlying this plan are, I was told, quite similar to those for sleep training a toddler, which I find both reassuring and a little humbling. Anyway, the upshot of this is that every evening I have six hours to fill when I feel incredibly tired but may not go to sleep — yet another awkward moment of limbo in the day. I need to learn how to do nothing again.

I know that the Olympics is coming up soon because I am in the grip of a sudden enthusiasm for a sport I have previously never cared about. In 2016 it was men’s long distance running. In 2012 it was dressage (which is clearly just “horse dancing”, let’s call it what it is). And this year, it’s the uneven bars event in women’s gymnastics. If you’re interested, I recommend this half hour documentary about how difficult it is, and how much doing it right feels like flying.

It is a little alarming how ready the mechanisms of the internet are to assist in nurturing this interest. A week ago, I was idly watching a “look at how amazing Simone Biles is” compilation video during a pomodoro break. The algorithm clocked that I watched this video all the way through and initially started serving me more of the same, and then transitioned into highlighting individual gymnasts’ YouTube channels.

Seven days in, I’m a diehard fan not only of Biles but of MyKayla Skinner too, a US gymnast (and Mormon) who caught Covid last year, developed pneumonia, and had to take months off her training because she couldn’t do a single somersault without wheezing, let alone the doubles and triples international competition requires. This past Sunday, she made the US Olympic team in spite of these setbacks and I must admit, I welled up a little bit.

A writing project that I worked on in the first half of this year has finally been announced and is available for pre-order: Agatha Christie’s England, a map and guide to the Queen of Crime’s literary locations.

I was asked to do this because of my podcast, Shedunnit, on which I talk about the so-called golden age of detective fiction that ran roughly 1920 to 1939. I might write another week about how I put together the scripts for that — if it’s of interest, let me know — and I agreed thinking that putting together the guide would be just like writing an extra long episode.

How wrong I was! Christie was both very specific about the locations in her fiction and, at times, maddeningly vague about how they mapped onto the real landscape. She defines where Miss Marple’s home village of St Mary Mead is in relation to a host of other imaginary places, but never according to, say, London. After a few days of fiddling around the edges of the project I finally just started reading her books again from the very beginning, making note of any helpful detail about distance or setting. I don’t recommend skimming 60+ books in a few weeks; your eyes go a bit funny.

I think it came out well in the end, though, and I hope the guide strikes a good balance between being actually useful if you are travelling to Devon and Cornwall this summer and want to do some sightseeing, and also interesting enough to read without leaving your house. If you want one, they’re available to pre order directly from the publisher here and will ship out mid July.

That’s all from me today; I’m still getting back into the habit of sending this thing. You can always hit reply if you’ve got anything you’d like to recommend to me – I am very interested in what niche sports you are suddenly keen on — or if there are things you’d like me to write about in the future.

Until next time,

Caroline

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: get my article and podcast recommendations in The Browser, listen to my murder mystery podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

My phone’s usage timer is my harshest critic. When I open the “digital wellness” app where it resides, I see a pie chart breaking down how I have spent my time on the device so far today. More often than not, the slice representing Instagram is more than half of the whole; even on days when I am fairly content with the amount of work I have done, I see that and think “that’s 90 minutes you could have spent with your dog, or reading a book for fun, or talking to a friend, or staring out the window”. I’m making only very slow progress on my ability to do nothing (as discussed in last week’s newsletter) and my screen time data feels like a rebuke every time I look at it.

I’ve written about phone addiction before. For that article I went through the 30-day process laid out in Catherine Price’s How To Breakup With Your Phone. I deleted all the apps that I was using to waste time thoughtlessly, I thought about why I was twitching towards my phone every time I was bored or alone with my thoughts for a second, and I even turned it off and put it in a drawer for extended periods of time. But none of these practices — sensible as they seem — stuck with me because ultimately I was doing it all for work, not because I had really come to a crisis point with my phone usage. Once I had filed the article, I immediately went back to sleeping with my phone within touching distance.

But then, a few weeks ago, I had to read out my phone usage data to a sleep therapist who was (rightly!) concerned that my screen time was playing a part in my chronic insomnia. “That’s quite high,” she said gently, as I tried to justify the day where the overall total was north of three hours by explaining that “being online” is part of my job. “Do you get paid for doing this?” she asked, as I rambled vaguely about trying to sell a book during a pandemic.

This stopped me in my tracks. Whenever I experience guilt about the phone usage pie chart, I quell those feelings with the argument that I need to spend all that time scrolling and being served adverts for improbable cottagecore dresses because I have to be on social media for work. How will anyone know that my work exists, otherwise? The fraught question of how the onus and cost of publicity work has shifted onto individuals in creative fields in the last few years is a larger topic for another day, but suffice to say that I am moderately resentful that if I was, say, 15 years older, this would be far less of an issue for me.

Until recently, this notion of excessive social media use as “work” wasn’t an aspect of the discussion around phone usage and addiction that I had seen addressed in public much. Good as Price’s book on this topic is, it’s mostly aimed at people who overuse their phones accessing work emails and their social media friends. Internet civilians, in other words, not those of us who toil professionally in the online content mines. There isn’t much leeway in her system for not being able to log off Twitter because it’s your job to be there.

Now, it is debatable how much I, or indeed anyone in my situation, actually needs to be on the apps that are dominating my pie chart. I’m not a social media manager, but I do still experience the pressure to post more often so that people can discover my podcast, for instance, and worry that in weeks where I don’t do it I’m failing or missing opportunities. In previous jobs, it has been my responsibility to run a magazine’s social media presence, and I think I’m still a little bit braced for the impact of the texts at 8am on a Saturday morning about what has or hasn’t been tweeted.

That said, I have slowly been collecting resources about the push-pull of social media usage when you work in an adjacent field. This episode of the Nobody Panic podcast does a good job of offering no nonsense advice and emphasising that you get to choose how much or little time you dedicate to it. This episode of Reply All has fewer solutions to offer but does articulate the genuine dilemma of wanting to be offline but being forced back on by work — world’s tiniest violin, I know, but I did feel for the host who had no choice but to reactivate his Twitter account so that he could get someone to appear as a guest on the show. The whole of Rachel Karten’s newsletter Link in Bio is very smart on this topic, but this post where her readers share their worries about logging off and this interview with someone who works at Instagram are relevant to what I’m discussing here.

The other day, I saw a Dutch sewing YouTuber I follow post about this on her Instagram story. She, too, justifies her constant presence online because of her work, but had recently audited what she actually does with her screen time and found that 90 per cent of it was spent scrolling rather than posting. Of course, being aware of what your peers are doing on a platform is part of the process of making content for it, but I thought her underlying point was right: she’s mostly there as a consumer, while telling herself she’s a creator.

I don’t have a neat solution to offer here; this is more of a “name the problem” exercise. However, if you find yourself in a similar situation, I can recommend a modified version of an exercise in Price’s book — every time you feel your fingers twitch towards your phone, ask yourself why you are picking it up. If the answer to that question is “because I have to post about X for work” or “I want to look at those nice pictures of Y’s new puppy”, go right ahead and feel no guilt about it. If there is no answer, though, you might find that there’s something better you can do with your time instead.

Until next time,

‌Caroline

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: get my article and podcast recommendations in The Browser, listen to my murder mystery podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

The evening that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down, I went for a long walk in the torrential rain. The two things weren’t really connected — I am not yet that addicted to my phone — but all my days are the same at the moment so it’s a useful marker. I had been waiting for the downpour to let up all day so that my dog could have a proper outing. By 9pm it had become clear that the magical walk-length window of dry weather was not going to materialise.

This happened several times last autumn too; when you live on a small peninsula that juts out into the Irish Sea a certain level of dampness is inevitable. Last year, though, I was not prepared. I would go out in my usual dog walking outfit of whatever I’m wearing anyway with plimsolls and a coat added and return soaked to the skin and shivering. Morris the dog loves to be soaking wet but I despise everything about it. And yet do nothing to prevent it.

But now I own that most miraculous of things: a matching set of waterproof trousers and jacket that both fit me comfortably and keep water out. I found them in the men’s sale bin at an outdoor shop in the Scottish Highlands this summer and I like them so much that sometimes I wear them when it’s only lightly drizzling because I now love being out in the wet and yet still dry.

On this particular walk, the waterproofs were more than earning their keep, as were my boots and hat. My father, a madman who enjoys doing things like sailing alone across the Atlantic, is fond of that saying “there is no bad weather, only bad clothing” and this sprung to mind as I trudged around the village in the damp dark. Now that I had the right clothing for possibly the first time in my life, I could finally appreciate how wrong what I had been doing before was.

This phenomenon of only noticing how bad or wrong something is once you have experienced the reverse has been on my mind recently. I’ve been reading and savouring Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman this week (I also recommend his newsletter, The Imperfectionist) and was struck by a point he made midway through about attention and distraction.

Beyond the now well-rehearsed point about how social media platforms are explicitly designed to attract your attention and expert in keeping it, he explains that we often aren’t even really aware of the extent to which this is happening. “The only faculty you can use to see what’s happening to your attention is your attention, the very thing that’s already been commandeered.”

It’s very hard to monitor yourself objectively, especially when distraction feels good because it’s helping you avoid something difficult. In a sense, I am my own unreliable narrator. I’ve written here before about the uncomfortableness of regularly examining your phone usage data, and I think this is why. The gap between my perception of how much my attention wanders and the actual amount of time I waste is large enough that I’m surprised every time I am confronted with it.

What does this have to do with finally owning good rain wear? I was halfway through enjoying my night time walk in the rain, using my boot heel to scrape leaf mould away from the grates so that the huge puddles suddenly boiled and then were sucked down into the drain below, before I realised that I could have had this a long time ago if I had just acted to correct what was making it unpleasant before.

It’s not enough just to notice there’s something wrong, although that is a necessary and often difficult stage of finding a solution to a problem. You have to then do something. I’ve been returning semi-hypothermic from wet walks for years without seeing this as a cue to purchase better clothing, and equally I’ve been wringing my hands while looking at my screen time graphs without altering my behaviour at all. I’m not yet sure what the equivalent of a good waterproof jacket for the internet is, but at least I’m finally looking for one.

What I’ve been up to

It’s been a while since I wrote to you; there’s been some stuff going on in life offline that has been hard and kept me from doing the newsletter. I’m also in a phase with work where there are several things I’m excited about on the boil in the background, but none of them are actually ready to serve up for public consumption yet. When they are, this is where I’ll tell you about them.

I did, however, publish a book review recently that I spent a lot of time on, so that’s available here if you’d like to read it. Find out a bit more about why I got so worked up about how to write about this particular book on my Instagram here. And in a fun development the magazine also asked me to read the piece aloud on their podcast, so if you prefer to listen instead you can hear me doing that from 13:20 in this episode.

My podcast about detective fiction, Shedunnit, continues — this week with an episode where I am the interviewee, rather than the interviewer, so if you’d like to hear my husband ask me questions about why I haven’t written a detective novel yet, this is where to go.

What I’m listening to, reading, watching

I’ve found this new podcast series about emotions hosted by Arthur C. Brooks interesting so far. The Irish Passport on Lady Lavery was good. There’s new Everything Is Alive and like Vinny the vending machine, I too have been through a lot. A good explanation of how the Sally Rooney book marketing campaign worked. An interview with a senior Instagram staffer who likes deactivating her Instagram.

I’ve naturally been glued to the Kidney Person discourse, and this is a good summation of the issues it raises. NB: All the other good articles I read these days go in The Browser. Battle Royal by Lucy Parker is a lighthearted book that got me through a tough time. Ditto The Hating Game by Sally Thorne. I am now on a serious historical fiction/mystery kick, and have piled up The Summer Queen by Elizabeth Chadwick, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and The Lady Agnes Mystery by Andrea Japp by my bed to enjoy as the nights draw in.

I am watching two shows at the moment: Only Murders in the Building on Disney+ because I am writing a column about it, and the 2020 series of The Great British Sewing Bee. I am also intrigued by, but have not yet started, Murder Island.

Until next time,

Caroline

Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links, I donate any and all money this ever generates to the Chester branch of Women’s Aid.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: get my article and podcast recommendations in The Browser, listen to my murder mystery podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter (although I’m not really there anymore) and Instagram (where I am, arguably, too much).