Seven years ago tonight

How the end of my first draft was the beginning of... everything

Seven years ago, I finished the first draft of my novel, Goat Street, and posted some photos on Facebook memorializing the moment.

I’d taken myself off to a self-imposed writing retreat in a small stone house in the far west of Ireland, where the novel is set. And I’d pounded the story’s first incarnation into submission, bird by bird, as I sat in front of a peat-log fire and ate a lot of soup and soda bread.

Today, a radically reimagined version of that story is wending its hopeful way towards publication. 🤞

Between then and now, that ending and this new beginning, lies everything. A whole lifetime.