where to begin?

✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧ start here ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧

6th October. 11.10pm, hour of my birth, Perthshire. Where it feels necessary to re-introduce myself after a long hiatus and cryptic first letter.

Tomorrow’s a full moon. I always feel my soul opening when there’s a dark sky and moonlight, cold air through the trees, and an open diary in my lap. That sounds like I’m outside, but I’m actually writing in bed, with the almost-full moon shining through a crack in the shutters. Home. Where is that? A small town nestled in the foothills of the highlands? Skye? Somewhere else? Perhaps it’s between the pages of my diary. There’s something comforting about these pages, rippled with days gone by. I can rest easy anywhere as long as I can turn a fresh page each night and scribe the date in the top right corner.

I’m bad at introductions, let’s start again.

My name’s Kate, a writer and diarist from Scotland. Born, as I said, at ten-past-eleven under a waxing gibbous, if that means anything to you.

I’ve been writing on substack for three years but have haunted various online corners for much longer. At fourteen, I began writing a diary and never stopped. Something I’ve finally come to understand about myself is that while I want to write (and have written) books, I am first and foremost a writer of diaries. It’s the thing I do when no one is looking. It’s what I’m doing right now when I could be sleeping or making money.

Substack is my online diary. A place to chronicle life and book writing, a way to build and organise a body of personal lore (it accumulates whether you want it to or not) in a half-mysterious, half-coherent way. A hymn to the only soul I’ll ever be close enough to to understand. It’s lighting candles by the river and constant indecision about dying hair midnight black. It’s poetry and red wine, train journeys north, and living on an island for a year. It’s every esoteric book I can find about werewolves. Finally buying the pack of tarot cards everyone assumes I’ve had since high school. Living for art and beauty. And it’s deeply personal because sinking is an art form.

I hope it’s clear that all this is being written by a fey but mortal, human woman who occasionally mispells words and gets the grammar wrong. It takes me a long time to write something or it takes an hour. Ringle-eyed, optimistic, a lover of beauty and nature devotee ~ I am here to record life’s mysteries as I experience them.

And lest this introduction be another esoteric ramble, here are other things I enjoy: swimming in rivers and the sea, black metal (metal music in general), waking up in the woods, tea, writing these notes, folklore, anything gothic, the moon, drinking wine from a crystal glass, reading all day, handwashing lingerie, speaking Gaelic, playing my bass guitar, dogs, the month of October, the month of May, astrology, roses, marzipan, romance, roadtrips on sunny weekends, making video diaries no one else sees, and many other little pleasures that escape me right now.

Maybe you can relate to some or all of that. Perhaps my own strange corner of the internet will call to others like you who want to live deeply and write more of the words that matter. I’d love to know more about readers in the comments, whether you’ve just stumbled upon this post or have been following for a while. Where are you from? What book are you reading? Your favourite film? Anything!

The best part about this diary is that you can write in it too :)

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p.s. Dawn and dusk letters will recommence soon as ‘dawn notes’ and ‘dusk notes’ to fit the diary-style direction I’m transitioning into. As before, free subscribers get access to dawn notes as often as I write them. Paid subscribers get a private dusk note every month and access to extra content. Paid subscriptions are still on pause ~ I’ll send word before I turn them back on.

My books:

Fireside Fairy Tales and Fireside Magic - story collections inspired by the folklore and magic of my native Scotland.

A magic trick for aspiring authors:

One Page Novel (KATE10 for 10% off)