Yesterday I took part in an excellent Substack live with Alexander Beiner over at Kainos (link below). It got me thinking, I should probably start to invest more time and effort into Substack, which evidently is *the* place where the writers, thinkers and algorithm-averse Instagram-haters hang out.
So far, I haven’t done much with this platform. I migrated an old blog, dating way back to 2013, and have updated incredibly patchily since then. There’s no real continuity or coherence to my output - a post about hating the gym here, a post about putting my kid in nursery there.
But I think this could start to become a lot more than that, and I’m going to make a concerted effort to post regularly. For my new subscribers: hi! Here’s a little bit about me, and what you might be in for as a result of clicking that sign-up button.
A couple of months ago, my first book, The Spirituality Gap, was unleashed into the world. The book explores what spirituality is coming to mean within our secular culture, through the eyes of someone who is both innately sceptical and somewhat mystically inclined. It covers 12 different practices, ranging from the obviously New Agey (tarot, astrology etc) to those that wouldn’t ordinarily be coded as spiritual (running, raves).
Prior to publication, I had no idea whether anyone would be remotely interested in the topic. And when people asked me about the book, I tended to clam up awkwardly. I don’t really run in spiritual circles, or those in which spirituality is an open item of discussion. Broaching this subject at all had the whiff of something faintly embarrassing, a bit like publishing a sex manual while hanging out exclusively with prudes.
But I think I underestimated my friends and family, who have been incredibly receptive on the whole. (Not prudes! Secret swingers, maybe?) And I certainly underestimated the strength of the wider network who enjoy these discussions. The more promo work I do, the more emboldened I feel to step up on my soapbox. Time, I think, to practice going deeper into the subjects that have fascinated me for years.
All this is to say, I’ll be posting more about spirituality-related topics over the months ahead. You can also expect posts about mental health, general ‘state of the world’ tirades, and a lot of stuff about early parenthood. (Full disclosure: I’ll mostly be writing in a sleep-deprived fug, as I’m expecting my second baby in a few weeks’ time.)
Life has been busy lately, what with work, book promo, a pending house move, late pregnancy, and a high-octane two-year-old. As a result, my writing has fallen through the cracks. But I’m very much hoping to make some space for it from here on in. Even if it IS just a barely-edited stream of consciousness bashed out in half an hour between obligations. Looking forward to engaging more with other people’s output too.