On joining the noticeboard

There is, as of this week, a small account on the internet with my name attached to it.

This is not, by my own measure, a development I expected. I have spent the better part of my writing life resisting the suggestion that an author ought to be available at all hours, in small portions, on a website. I prefer the longer form. I prefer the page that has been thought about. I prefer to be, as far as is possible, the person who turns up only when there is something to say.

Several people whose judgement I trust have pointed out, with great patience, that readers do not live where I live. They live where everyone else lives, which is, increasingly, on a screen with a number of other small concerns competing for the same minute of attention. Eventually, with no publisher to insist on the point for me, I have insisted on it to myself. I have agreed, with some reluctance and a great deal of caveat, to be a small concern.

The platform, for those who keep track of such things, is Bluesky. It seemed the least frightening of the available options. The character limit is three hundred, which is roughly a paragraph if you behave yourself, and which I have decided to treat as a discipline rather than a constraint. A paragraph is not nothing. A great deal of what I admire most in the form is, in the end, a single good paragraph stuck on the front of a longer one.

The journal is not going anywhere. This, here, remains the place for the longer thought, the one that wants three pages rather than three sentences. Think of the social account, if you must think of it at all, as the porch light. The work is still inside.

The work, on that subject, is proceeding. The second book has, in the last week or so, stopped looking like a heap of index cards and started looking like a book. The idea I was being careful not to startle, in the last entry but one, has consented to be written down. The suspects have begun to behave like people who would, if pressed, account for themselves. I do not yet have a final shape, but I can now see the shape from across the room, which is the first properly hopeful sign.

If you find yourself on the relevant website, and inclined to look me up, the account is there. I will try not to be tiresome. The books, as ever, remain the point.

— V.