Have you ever read a book that stayed with you because it didn’t rush?
Not because it was slow for the sake of it, but because it trusted you enough to let ideas unfold in their own time—to let questions linger, and meanings surface gradually rather than being pushed to the foreground.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that kind of patience this year.
Not the forced kind—the sort where you’re waiting for something to happen while quietly willing it along—but the deeper kind. The patience that comes from allowing a thing to become what it already is, rather than what you’d like it to be in a hurry.
It’s something I’ve been reminded of again and again while working on the Earth Song books.
From the outside, it probably looks like a fairly ordinary year: books sitting on shelves, covers changing, titles remaining the same. But beneath that surface, a quieter process has been unfolding—one that feels very much in keeping with the kinds of stories I’m drawn to. Buried truths. Slow discoveries. Patterns that only make sense when you stop trying to force them.
One of the lessons I’ve relearned is that clarity is rarely dramatic. It doesn’t arrive with a bang. More often, it emerges gradually, as small inconsistencies are smoothed away and assumptions are gently challenged. You realise, almost by surprise, that something now feels right where it once felt slightly off.
That’s been true of the work as a whole. The stories themselves haven’t changed, but the way they present themselves to the world has become more honest—more in tune with what they’re actually about. Less noise. Fewer signals pointing in different directions. Just a clearer invitation to step into a particular kind of mystery.
As readers, we recognise this instinctively. We all know the difference between a book that’s trying too hard and one that trusts us to meet it halfway. The latter doesn’t rush. It doesn’t shout. It allows questions to breathe, and it’s confident enough to leave some answers in shadow for a while.
That’s the space I’ve been aiming for.
There’s a temptation, especially at the end of a year, to frame everything in terms of progress and momentum. But not all progress looks like movement. Sometimes it looks like stillness. Sometimes it looks like restraint. And sometimes it looks like choosing not to hurry a story that isn’t finished revealing itself yet.
If there’s a thread running through this year’s work, it’s this: some things only become visible when you slow down enough to notice them.
And perhaps that’s why stories about discovery—real discovery—keep returning in our culture. Not the loud kind, but the quiet moments when something vast and unsettling comes into focus, and we’re left to sit with the implications.
That’s a thought I’ll come back to soon.