The book is filed, sex is binary, the twitbird is dead...

...and other summertime updates

I’ve been away. Did you miss me? Did you even notice?! Hmmm. Don’t answer that. Anyway, I’m back. We did an extremely adventurous holiday, driving to France with all three kids via the Dover - Calais ferry, and then camping in two very small tents all the way down almost as far as Perpignan and back. I don’t know whether to write about it for you though because a) it’s not really my usual subject matter and b) talking about holidays is particularly sensitive at the cost of living spirals. On the other hand it was the kind of holiday that I would never have had the confidence to do if I hadn’t met my partner, who did similarly adventurous things when he was growing up, in contrast to my own family experiences of the odd visit to friends in Cornwall and one package holiday to Crete. It was also (in the grand scheme of family holidays with three kids), lower budget than average. Anyway, if you want me to write about it in detail, let me know in the comments. If not, well we will just move on and leave the travel writing to the experts!

Before I left I filed book 4. The final week before we went I was booking campsites with one hand and doing panicked last minute edits with the other. I didn’t make any mistakes with the campsite bookings, which amazed me - I was sure we would turn up at one and they would say, “Non?”, but miraculously, that didn’t happen. That left me wondering if all of the mistakes were in the manuscript I emailed off to the publishers instead. It seems likely.

What’s happened now is the book has been read by the main editor (who is Executive Publisher at the imprint) and another woman who is a Senior Commissioning Editor. They both agreed that they liked it (phew), and made some nice comments. They’ve now passed it to a freelance editor who is going to work with me to sharpen it up a bit - they didn’t feel it needed structural edits but rather a ‘hybrid line edit and copy edit combined’ as they put it. At some point that person, who is currently reading my book but whose name I don’t yet know, is going to pop up in my inbox with more work for me to do, probably before the end of August.

In the meantime I am enjoying breathing out and barely giving it any thought. I have tidied up several areas of my house that had been neglected for about six months and travelled round France and eaten a lot of cheese and drunk some wine and read a couple of light fiction novels. I’ve sent a few pitches to the Mail but not been commissioned. And I’ve turned my thoughts to my ‘nearly finished’ children’s fiction book, and that’s what I’m going to do next while the kids are still on holiday, I think. After that there will be the inevitable pain of the edits and then hopefully at some point I can start actually telling you about this book! The publishers, who had decided on a title, have now said they are having second thoughts about it. I’ll keep you posted!

In the mean time the discussions around sex and gender identity continue and even though I was only unplugged for a couple of weeks on holiday, by the time I got back from France I felt like the whole temperature had suddenly changed. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that one major development is that Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and lifelong critic of pseudoscience and cult-like thinking, has very much picked a side and thankfully it’s the side of both women’s rights and rational thought. His podcast with Helen Joyce is worth a listen. (sharing the youtube link but it’s on all podcast platforms).

When I listened to Dawkins and read his various tweets on the issue it was impossible for me not to remember one of the emails from Birthrights in which they told me that my stating that “people can only be male or female” was “harmful and distressing” adding, "I’m afraid that Birthrights isn’t able to work with people who don’t share our inclusive values.” I do wonder if any of the people involved in the absolute trashing of my reputation in November 2020 look back on it with any sense of shame or regret, in particular as it becomes clear how cult-like and damaging this whole ideology is, and how many intelligent people can see right through it.

There have been so many other developments in the past few weeks - too many to catalogue. (is there a substack that gives a clear daily round-up of it all?! If not maybe I should launch one!). Keeping up with it all involves spending too much time on twitter - and that’s another development of course, twitter is now rebranded as ‘X’ and you don’t ‘tweet’ or ‘retweet’ any more, you ‘post’ and ‘repost’. Some say Elon is going to kill the bird entirely. It’s hard to predict. Meanwhile some people are giving energy to the new Zuckerberg platform ‘threads’ - I’ve set it up but can barely bring myself to get sucked into it. (find me here if you wish). And then there is the substack ‘notes’ as well? Plus of course instagram and facebook if you can still be bothered with such antiquity! It’s all got to be slimmed down somehow, hasn’t it? If going away on holiday has taught me anything it’s that cutting ties with social media is quite difficult but after the initial pain it’s a massive relief. Let me know in the comments which of the platforms, if any, you find serves you more than you serve it? I’d be interested.

The sun is shining here in Somerset today and I’m typing this in the garden with a lot of butterflies flapping around. I absolutely love summer time and the optimism it brings. I’ve also had some nice news about Give Birth like a Feminist apparently being translated into Ukranian and Czech. The Ukrainian edition sounds particularly interesting because it is being organised by an NGO who are working to promote women’s rights in childbirth amidst the current war. I hope to get more information about their work and share it with you here at some point. For now though, I will sign off. Love to all, Milli x

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