How a book begins

Dispatches from the frontlines of a draft

Hi little coven. My third book, The Shadow Path, is out today. Links to buy are available at the bottom of this email. If you ordered a copy, you can claim a bonus companion eBooklet featuring 11 exclusive tarot spreads here.

On the book’s birthday, there are a couple of things I want to say to you:

First, please indulge me in quoting from the acknowledgements which are included the back of the book: “Thank you to everyone who reads and recommends my work in any format. I am especially grateful to the full-access and founding subscribers to my newsletter, The Shuffle. Your support fuels the work I do there, but it also makes my broader efforts – like writing books – possible. I’m blessed to be in community with you."

Second, I’ve included a short essay below. I wrote the first two-thirds in the early stages of writing this book, and the final portion today, on publication day. I hope it offers you an intriguing and realistic window into my process — or at least, my process this time around.

How a book begins.

I.

This is how it happens…

There will be many false starts, and many broken promises. These will circle like vultures and in the early days, this thing will stay alive just to spite them. (There will be cliches you probably should have cut, but there will be darlings you can’t bear to kill.)

There will be glitter and there will be sludge. There will be enough reams on the cutting room floor to fill a library. There will never be enough time to say everything right, and endless sleepless nights to fill up with everything that’s wrong.

There will be potential glimmering at the corner of your vision, flitting out of sight if you turn to take it in. There will be gifts you’re sure you don’t deserve.

There will be a middle that feels like the unsatisfying end of everything.

There will be too many words and there will never be enough.

There will be procrastination and pearls, squeezed from the pressure you hate yourself for pursuing, even if the process works every time.

You know how this works by now, but admitting it feels like cheating.

II.

On a Saturday afternoon, over hazelnut tea and canelés bordelais, I started the fifth book I will complete. The third that will bear my name on its spine. The first that comes with a luxurious accessory: the knowledge that I know what I’m doing.

And yet. Like any expensive statement piece, I am hesitant to wear it.

There’s the usual self-consciousness, the imposter phenomenon, the societally conditioned humility-bordering-on-self-effacement. I’m exposed! I’m a fraud! I’m not allowed to know that I know what I’m doing!

Mostly, though, there’s this: The knowing doesn’t make doing it well any easier.

In fact, the knowing can make the doing so much harder.

III.

It feels fitting that writing this book (a guide to meeting, and integrating, our hidden Shadow selves with creativity, curiosity, and self-compassion) has been an exercise in confronting myself: What I know. What don’t know. What I’m capable of. The ways in which I torture myself when I could be supporting myself.

It feels fitting that the book arrives on shelves under a new moon - the darkest phase of the lunar cycle. In the book, I wrote that no matter what phase the moon is in, it’s always a whole moon — whether the light touches it or not. I wrote that our souls work the same — that we are so whole, so full and brilliant, even when we don’t feel shiny or visible or beautiful.

It feels fitting that releasing this book forces me to step off the beaten path of the past several years of my publishing career and dig deep to find what’s next.

For the first time in five years, I don’t have a book on the way. There’s no guiding light, just the blank page’s goth cousin: the velvet infinity of all that’s possible.

For the first time in five years, I have to walk into the dark, follow the dim lantern light of my own curiosity, to find what’s waiting for me… to reach out my hand and let it come in its own time, in its own way.

This is how it happens…

UK readers can use the dropdown menu here to select your preferred format and retailer.

US readers can pre-order the audiobook here.

European and international readers should check your version of Amazon/reach out to you local English bookshops. The book is also available now, shipping globally, from Shakespeare & Company.