@cogenta/starters 0.3.0 → 0.4.0

package/dist/blueprints/blog-copy-en.js

@@ -0,0 +1,701 @@
+import { bullet, figure, h2, numbered, p, quote, rule } from './blog-rich.js';
+/** The blog blueprint in English. See `blog-copy.ts` for the shape. */
+export const BLOG_COPY_EN = {
+    locale: 'en',
+    defaultPublicationName: 'Field Notes',
+    schema: {
+        category: { name: 'category', singular: 'Category', plural: 'Categories' },
+        tag: { name: 'tag', singular: 'Tag', plural: 'Tags' },
+        post: { singular: 'Post', plural: 'Posts' },
+        page: { singular: 'Page', plural: 'Pages' },
+    },
+    categories: [
+        {
+            name: 'Reading',
+            slug: 'reading',
+            description: 'Books reread and books abandoned, and what a train does for attention.',
+        },
+        {
+            name: 'Writing',
+            slug: 'writing',
+            description: 'Drafts, revision, notebooks, and the unglamorous work of finishing.',
+        },
+        {
+            name: 'Walking',
+            slug: 'walking',
+            description: 'Routes taken slowly, and the thinking that happens along them.',
+        },
+        {
+            name: 'Letters',
+            slug: 'letters',
+            description: 'Shorter notes written every other Sunday, closer to correspondence.',
+        },
+    ],
+    tags: [
+        { name: 'Drafts', slug: 'drafts' },
+        { name: 'Revision', slug: 'revision' },
+        { name: 'Notebooks', slug: 'notebooks' },
+        { name: 'Habits', slug: 'habits' },
+        { name: 'Trains', slug: 'trains' },
+        { name: 'Libraries', slug: 'libraries' },
+        { name: 'Rereading', slug: 'rereading' },
+        { name: 'Attention', slug: 'attention' },
+    ],
+    featuredSlug: 'what-the-second-draft-is-for',
+    latestLetterSlug: 'letter-what-i-read-in-august',
+    lettersCategorySlug: 'letters',
+    slugs: {
+        home: 'home',
+        about: 'about',
+        archive: 'archive',
+        newsletter: 'newsletter',
+        credits: 'photo-credits',
+    },
+    home: {
+        title: 'Home',
+        seoDescription: (siteName) => `${siteName}: essays and letters on reading, writing and walking.`,
+        eyebrow: 'Start here',
+        readEssay: 'Read the essay',
+        latestTitle: 'Latest',
+        epigraph: {
+            text: 'The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.',
+            author: 'Samuel Johnson',
+            role: 'In James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 1775',
+        },
+        archiveTitle: 'From the archive',
+        moreTitle: 'A few more essays',
+        subjectsTitle: 'What I write about',
+        letterTitle: 'The Sunday letter',
+        letterText: 'Every other Sunday, a short letter about what I have been reading and what the notebooks keep circling. Each one is published here and in the feed.',
+        letterFollow: 'How to follow it',
+        letterLatest: 'Read the latest letter',
+    },
+    about: {
+        title: 'About',
+        body: ({ siteName, desk }) => [
+            p(`${siteName} is where I publish essays and letters about reading, writing and walking. ` +
+                'It started in 2024 as a way to finish things: I had thirteen years of notebooks and ' +
+                'almost nothing in them that anyone else could read.'),
+            p('I live in Leeds and work three days a week as a copy editor at a university press in ' +
+                'York, which is why so much of what appears here was written on a train. On the other ' +
+                'two days I write, mostly in the morning, and mostly by hand first.'),
+            ...figure(desk, 'The desk by the window, where the pieces that were not written on a train were written.'),
+            h2('What you will find here'),
+            p('Essays, roughly one a month, between a thousand and two thousand words, on whatever ' +
+                'the notebooks have been circling. Letters every other Sunday, which are shorter and ' +
+                'closer to what I would write to a friend. Everything is filed under one of four ' +
+                'subjects, and the archive lists all of it by year.'),
+            h2('How it is made'),
+            p('Every piece starts in a plain text file and goes through at least two full drafts ' +
+                'before it appears here. There is no advertising, no sponsored link and no tracking ' +
+                'beyond a count of visits that stores nothing about you. Corrections are made in place ' +
+                'and noted at the end of the piece.'),
+        ],
+        faqTitle: 'Questions readers ask',
+        faq: (siteName) => [
+            {
+                key: 'demo-faq-cadence',
+                question: 'How often do you publish?',
+                answer: 'An essay about once a month and a letter every other Sunday. Nothing goes out to fill a slot: an essay that is not ready waits for the next month.',
+            },
+            {
+                key: 'demo-faq-quoting',
+                question: 'Can I quote or republish a piece?',
+                answer: 'Quote as much as is useful, with a link back to the original. To republish a whole piece, write to me first. The answer is almost always yes.',
+            },
+            {
+                key: 'demo-faq-guests',
+                question: 'Do you publish guest essays?',
+                answer: `No. Everything on ${siteName} is written by one person, which is most of the point of it.`,
+            },
+            {
+                key: 'demo-faq-feed',
+                question: 'Is there a feed?',
+                answer: 'Yes. It carries every essay and letter in full, and its link is at the foot of every page.',
+            },
+        ],
+    },
+    archive: {
+        title: 'Archive',
+        intro: (siteName) => `Every essay and letter published on ${siteName}, newest first, grouped by the year it appeared.`,
+    },
+    newsletter: {
+        title: 'The Sunday letter',
+        paragraphs: (siteName) => [
+            'Every other Sunday I write a short letter: what I have been reading, a paragraph or two ' +
+                'about whatever the notebooks are circling, and now and then the first version of an ' +
+                'idea that becomes an essay a few months later.',
+            `Each letter is published on ${siteName} on the Sunday morning, filed under Letters, ` +
+                'and the feed carries it in full the same hour. A feed reader is the simplest way to ' +
+                'follow along, and the one I use myself.',
+            'There are no sponsors and no sequence of welcome messages. Replies reach me directly, ' +
+                'and several letters have begun as an answer to one.',
+        ],
+        ctaTitle: 'Follow the letters',
+        ctaText: 'The feed carries every letter and essay in full, the morning each one is published.',
+        subscribe: 'Subscribe to the feed',
+        past: 'Read past letters',
+    },
+    credits: {
+        title: 'Photo credits',
+        intro: 'Every photograph on this site is real, not generated, and is used under the licence its photographer chose. Cropped and resized; nothing else changed.',
+        line: (credit) => `${credit.title} · ${credit.author} · ${credit.licence} · ${credit.source}`,
+    },
+    menus: {
+        header: [
+            { label: 'Archive', url: '/archive' },
+            { label: 'About', url: '/about' },
+        ],
+        footer: [
+            { label: 'Archive', url: '/archive' },
+            { label: 'About', url: '/about' },
+            { label: 'The Sunday letter', url: '/newsletter' },
+            { label: 'Feed', url: '/feed.xml' },
+            { label: 'Photo credits', url: '/photo-credits' },
+        ],
+        headerAction: { label: 'Subscribe', url: '/newsletter' },
+    },
+    settings: {
+        tagline: 'Essays and letters on reading, writing and walking.',
+        footerNote: 'Written in Leeds and on the train to York. Quote freely, with a link back to the original.',
+        socialLinks: [
+            { label: 'Mastodon', url: 'https://mastodon.social/@example' },
+            { label: 'Bluesky', url: 'https://bsky.app/profile/example.bsky.social' },
+            { label: 'Instagram', url: 'https://instagram.com/example' },
+        ],
+    },
+    widgets: {
+        aboutTitle: 'About',
+        aboutBody: 'Essays and letters by a copy editor who lives in Leeds and writes most mornings, often on the train to York. One essay a month, a letter every other Sunday.',
+        aboutLink: 'More about me',
+        searchTitle: 'Search',
+        searchPlaceholder: 'Essays and letters',
+        recentTitle: 'Recently',
+        subjectsTitle: 'Subjects',
+        tagsTitle: 'Tags',
+        yearTitle: 'By year',
+        relatedTitle: 'Further reading',
+    },
+    mediaAlt: {
+        'notebook-and-coffee': 'A closed notebook and a kraft envelope beside a latte and a pen on a wooden table',
+        desk: 'A pale desk by a curtained window with an open laptop and a small plant',
+        notebooks: 'A tall stack of worn notebooks bound with elastic bands on a wooden bench',
+        platform: 'An empty train platform lit by sunrise, with a train approaching in the distance',
+        'pour-over': 'Water pouring into coffee grounds inside a paper filter cone during a pour-over',
+        typing: 'A close view of two hands typing on a laptop keyboard, one wearing a wedding ring',
+        library: 'The red-brick facade of a small public library, its door framed by an arch and two lamps',
+    },
+    posts: [
+        {
+            title: 'Why I still draft in plain text',
+            slug: 'plain-text-editor',
+            topic: 'Drafts',
+            cover: 'typing',
+            excerpt: 'Nine writing apps in eight years, and the one file format that outlasted every one of them.',
+            publishedAt: '2024-02-11T08:30:00.000Z',
+            categorySlug: 'writing',
+            tagSlugs: ['drafts', 'habits'],
+            body: () => [
+                p('Between 2016 and 2024 I paid for nine writing apps. I kept the receipts because I was ' +
+                    'embarrassed by them, which is its own kind of record keeping. Each one promised a calmer ' +
+                    'place to think. Each one, within two years, had added a sidebar, a sync indicator, a ' +
+                    'streak counter and a banner about the new plan.'),
+                p('The drafts from those years are now spread across export formats I can no longer open ' +
+                    'without the app that made them. Two of the apps no longer exist. One of them turned my ' +
+                    'footnotes into a proprietary block that exports as a row of question marks.'),
+                h2('What a text file keeps'),
+                p('A plain text file keeps three things the others eventually lost for me. It opens on any ' +
+                    'machine I have owned, including a borrowed laptop at my sister’s kitchen table. It will ' +
+                    'open in twenty years, because the format is the words and nothing else. And it asks ' +
+                    'nothing of me while I write: there is no count to beat and no badge to earn.'),
+                bullet('One folder per piece, named with the date I started it.'),
+                bullet('One file per draft, numbered, never overwritten.'),
+                bullet('A notes file beside them for everything I cut, because I always want it back.'),
+                p('The folder for this piece holds four drafts and a notes file longer than any of them. ' +
+                    'Nearly everything I still like in the final version came out of that notes file on the ' +
+                    'third pass.'),
+                p('Formatting waits until the end. Italics are underscores, headings are a line of capitals, ' +
+                    'and a link is an address on a line of its own. When a piece is finished I paste it into ' +
+                    'the site and spend ten minutes setting it properly, and those ten minutes are pleasant ' +
+                    'precisely because the writing is already done.'),
+                quote('The tool I trust is the one that has nothing to say about my writing.'),
+                p('I have nothing against good software. I use a very good editor every day at work, where I ' +
+                    'correct other people’s manuscripts and need its tracked changes. For my own first drafts ' +
+                    'I want less than that: a blinking cursor, and the knowledge that the file will still be ' +
+                    'there when I come back to it, in whatever year that turns out to be.'),
+            ],
+        },
+        {
+            title: 'The long way to the library',
+            slug: 'the-long-way-to-the-library',
+            topic: 'Libraries',
+            cover: 'library',
+            excerpt: 'Forty minutes on foot instead of twelve on the bus, twice a week, and what the extra half hour turned out to be for.',
+            publishedAt: '2024-05-19T07:15:00.000Z',
+            categorySlug: 'walking',
+            tagSlugs: ['libraries', 'attention'],
+            body: () => [
+                p('Twice a week I walk to the central library to write. The bus takes twelve minutes and ' +
+                    'stops outside. The walk takes forty, through the park, over the canal bridge and up the ' +
+                    'long hill past the old tram depot. For a year I told myself the walk was exercise. It ' +
+                    'took most of that year to admit it was the most productive part of the morning.'),
+                p('I leave the house with a question about whatever I am writing, usually a small one: why ' +
+                    'the second section drags, whether an example belongs, what the last line should do. I ' +
+                    'take no notes on the way. By the canal the question has usually changed shape, and by ' +
+                    'the top of the hill I tend to know which paragraph to open first.'),
+                h2('Why the route matters'),
+                p('I have tried other routes. The shortest follows the main road, and it is useless for ' +
+                    'thinking, because every crossing asks for attention and every bus stop is a small ' +
+                    'decision about whether to give up and get on. The long route has three road crossings in ' +
+                    'forty minutes and a stretch of towpath where nobody needs anything from me.'),
+                p('The park helps too, though in a plainer way than a wellness article would put it. It is ' +
+                    'the one part of the walk where I see the same people on the same days: a man training a ' +
+                    'very reluctant spaniel, and two women who run the same loop in opposite directions and ' +
+                    'wave each time they pass. Their routine makes mine feel less like a trick I am playing on ' +
+                    'myself.'),
+                h2('The reading room'),
+                p('The reading room opens at nine. There are twenty-four desks, green lamps that nobody ' +
+                    'switches on in summer, and a rule of silence the staff enforce with a look rather than a ' +
+                    'sign. I take the same desk when I can, fourth from the window, and write by hand for the ' +
+                    'first hour before I open the laptop.'),
+                p('The walk home is for reading back what I wrote, in my head, and it is where I find most ' +
+                    'of the sentences that need to go. I have learned to trust that verdict more than the one ' +
+                    'I reach at the desk, perhaps because by then I have forgotten how hard each sentence was ' +
+                    'to write.'),
+                bullet('Leave the phone in the bag until the library door.'),
+                bullet('Carry one question, never a list of them.'),
+                bullet('Take the same route, so that the route stops asking for decisions.'),
+                p('None of this survives a deadline, and I do not pretend it would. When work is heavy I ' +
+                    'take the bus like everyone else. The pieces on this site that I still like were, almost ' +
+                    'without exception, started on the towpath.'),
+            ],
+        },
+        {
+            title: 'Letter: what a commonplace book is for',
+            slug: 'letter-commonplace-book',
+            topic: 'Notebooks',
+            excerpt: 'A reader asked how I keep the passages I want to remember from the books I read. The answer involves a pencil and a lot of empty pages.',
+            publishedAt: '2024-08-04T06:45:00.000Z',
+            categorySlug: 'letters',
+            tagSlugs: ['notebooks', 'rereading'],
+            body: () => [
+                p('This letter began as a reply to a reader in Utrecht who asked how I keep track of ' +
+                    'quotations, and whether I use an app for it. I keep a commonplace book, which is the old ' +
+                    'name for a notebook of passages copied out by hand, and I have kept one since 2015.'),
+                p('The rules are few. A passage only goes in if I copy it by hand, with the page number and ' +
+                    'the date. If I am not willing to copy it, I did not care about it enough, and that rule ' +
+                    'alone removes nine tenths of what I would otherwise have highlighted.'),
+                bullet('Copy by hand, never paste.'),
+                bullet('Write the date, the book and the page on the same line as the passage.'),
+                bullet('Leave the facing page empty for whatever you think of it later.'),
+                p('The facing page is the part that matters. Months later, reading back, I write a line or ' +
+                    'two opposite the quotation: where it came up again, what it argued with, whether I still ' +
+                    'believe it. The best entries have three or four of those notes, in different pens, ' +
+                    'across several years.'),
+                p('I used to call it a record of reading. It is closer to a record of rereading. A passage ' +
+                    'is rarely useful the day I copy it out. It becomes useful the third time I open the book ' +
+                    'at random on a train and find that a sentence from 2014 has quietly answered a question ' +
+                    'I am stuck on this week.'),
+                p('Thank you for writing in. Replies to these letters reach me directly, and they are often ' +
+                    'where the next one begins.'),
+            ],
+        },
+        {
+            title: 'What the second draft is for',
+            slug: 'what-the-second-draft-is-for',
+            topic: 'Revision',
+            excerpt: 'A first draft tells you what a piece is about. The second is where you find out what it is for, and most of the work is deciding what it can live without.',
+            publishedAt: '2024-10-20T08:00:00.000Z',
+            cover: 'notebook-and-coffee',
+            categorySlug: 'writing',
+            tagSlugs: ['revision', 'drafts'],
+            body: () => [
+                p('I spend three days a week correcting other people’s manuscripts for a university press, ' +
+                    'and the most common thing I see is a finished first draft that its author believes is a ' +
+                    'second one. The sentences have been improved and the commas are in the right places. The ' +
+                    'piece still does what it did the first time: it wanders towards its point and arrives ' +
+                    'there on the last page, a little surprised.'),
+                p('I recognise it because I do it too. A first draft is how a writer finds out what they ' +
+                    'think, and it is almost always organised in the order the thinking happened, which is ' +
+                    'rarely the order a reader needs. The second draft exists to fix that, and polishing ' +
+                    'sentences is the easiest way to avoid doing it.'),
+                h2('Read it as a stranger'),
+                p('The first step takes no writing at all. I print the draft and read it somewhere I would ' +
+                    'read somebody else’s work: on the train, or in the chair by the window with a cup of ' +
+                    'coffee going cold. I correct nothing on this pass. I only put a mark in the margin ' +
+                    'wherever my attention drifts.'),
+                p('Those marks are the most honest editor I have, and they cluster. There is nearly always a ' +
+                    'run of three or four paragraphs in the middle where I, the author, the one reader ' +
+                    'guaranteed to be interested, started thinking about lunch. That run is where the draft is ' +
+                    'explaining something to itself.'),
+                p('When the marks are in, I read the marked stretches aloud. My voice finds what my eye ' +
+                    'forgives: a sentence I run out of breath in, a word repeated three lines apart, a joke ' +
+                    'that only works in silence. I do it quietly, in an empty room, and I have stopped feeling ' +
+                    'foolish about it.'),
+                h2('Write the one sentence'),
+                p('Before touching the text I write, on a separate page, one sentence that says what the ' +
+                    'piece should leave a reader able to see or do that they could not before. It takes ' +
+                    'several attempts, and the failed attempts are useful, because each one describes a ' +
+                    'different essay I could write instead.'),
+                p('For this essay the sentence was: a reader should come away able to tell a revised draft ' +
+                    'from a polished one. Everything that does not serve that sentence becomes a candidate for ' +
+                    'the notes file.'),
+                quote('Most of revision is deciding what the piece can live without.'),
+                h2('Take things out in the right order'),
+                p('Cutting is where most revisions stall, because it feels like losing work. I cut in a ' +
+                    'fixed order that makes it bearable.'),
+                numbered('Whole sections that serve a different sentence. They go to the notes file intact, often ' +
+                    'with a line about the other essay they belong to.'),
+                numbered('Paragraphs that repeat an idea the piece has already made clear. The second statement is ' +
+                    'usually the better one, so I move it up and delete the first.'),
+                numbered('Examples that illustrate the same point twice. One exact example does more than three ' +
+                    'adequate ones.'),
+                numbered('Hedges: *probably*, *perhaps*, *in some ways*. I keep one where the doubt is real and remove ' +
+                    'the rest.'),
+                p('Only after those four passes do I look at sentences. By then there are fewer of them, and ' +
+                    'the ones that remain have a job, which makes it much clearer how each should be written.'),
+                h2('Move the ending to the beginning'),
+                p('The most reliable change I make, in my own drafts and in the manuscripts I edit, is to ' +
+                    'find the paragraph where the writer finally states their point and ask whether it could ' +
+                    'open the piece. About half the time it can. The draft then has to be rebuilt around a ' +
+                    'reader who already knows where they are going, and that rebuilding is most of what a ' +
+                    'second draft is.'),
+                p('It is uncomfortable, because the old opening is often the part I liked best. It was the ' +
+                    'part I wrote while the idea was new. I keep those openings in the notes file too, and ' +
+                    'every so often one of them becomes the first line of something else.'),
+                h2('An example from this spring'),
+                p('This spring I worked on a history of a Pennine canal, written by a retired lock-keeper who ' +
+                    'knew more about the subject than anyone alive. His first draft ran to four hundred pages ' +
+                    'and followed the canal from its source to its end, one lock at a time, because that was ' +
+                    'the order in which he had walked it for forty years.'),
+                p('The sentences were fine. The trouble was that the book’s real subject, the families who ' +
+                    'had worked the locks across three generations, appeared only in the final chapter, where ' +
+                    'he wrote about his own grandfather. We spent two months moving that chapter to the front ' +
+                    'and rebuilding everything else as a way of following those families down the water.'),
+                p('He cut ninety pages, most of them descriptions of locks built exactly like the ones before. ' +
+                    'He kept every page in a folder, and he told me at the end that the folder was the book he ' +
+                    'had needed to write in order to find the other one.'),
+                h2('Know when to stop'),
+                p('A second draft is finished when I can read it as a stranger without making a single mark ' +
+                    'in the margin, and when the sentence I wrote at the start is still true of it. It is ' +
+                    'rarely finished when it feels finished. That feeling tends to arrive one draft early, at ' +
+                    'the point where I have stopped finding problems because I have stopped looking for them.'),
+                p('When I am unsure I leave it for a week. The piece that still reads well after seven days ' +
+                    'goes out. The one that does not goes back into its folder with the new marks, and the ' +
+                    'train does the rest.'),
+                rule(),
+                h2('Notes'),
+                numbered('Paper works best for me, but the setting matters more than the medium. The same draft in ' +
+                    'a different typeface on a different screen shows up nearly as many problems.'),
+                numbered('The notes file for this essay runs to 2,300 words. Three earlier openings are in it, and ' +
+                    'one of them is now the first paragraph of a letter.'),
+            ],
+        },
+        {
+            title: 'Books I reread every winter',
+            slug: 'books-i-reread-every-winter',
+            topic: 'Rereading',
+            cover: 'pour-over',
+            excerpt: 'Five books that come off the shelf in the first week of January, and why rereading has become more useful to me than reading something new.',
+            publishedAt: '2025-01-12T09:10:00.000Z',
+            categorySlug: 'reading',
+            tagSlugs: ['rereading', 'habits'],
+            body: () => [
+                p('Every year, in the first week of January, the same five books come off the shelf. I did ' +
+                    'not plan the ritual. It collected itself over about a decade, one book at a time, and at ' +
+                    'some point I noticed I was reaching for them in the same order.'),
+                p('Rereading has a poor reputation among people who keep reading lists, because it looks ' +
+                    'like a failure to move on. I have come to think it is the only reading I do where I ' +
+                    'notice myself changing: the book stays exactly where it was, and I do not.'),
+                bullet('*A Month in the Country*, by J. L. Carr. A short novel about a summer spent uncovering a ' +
+                    'medieval wall painting in a Yorkshire church. I read it in one sitting on the first ' +
+                    'Sunday of the year, and it resets my sense of how much a small book can hold.'),
+                bullet('*The Summer Book*, by Tove Jansson. A grandmother and a granddaughter on an island in the ' +
+                    'Gulf of Finland. Every year a different chapter is my favourite, which tells me more about ' +
+                    'the year than about the book.'),
+                bullet('*The Rings of Saturn*, by W. G. Sebald. A walk along the Suffolk coast that keeps turning ' +
+                    'into something else. It taught me that an essay may wander for as long as the reader ' +
+                    'trusts the person walking.'),
+                bullet('*The Writing Life*, by Annie Dillard. Read over two evenings, mostly for the pages about ' +
+                    'the cabin where she worked, and then put back until next year.'),
+                bullet('*Middlemarch*, by George Eliot. The one that lasts all of January. I read about sixty pages ' +
+                    'a night and still find sentences I have no memory of.'),
+                h2('What I look for the second time'),
+                p('The first reading of a good book is mostly about what happens. By the third or fourth, ' +
+                    'the story is out of the way and I can watch how the book is made: where a chapter chooses ' +
+                    'to end, how long a scene runs before the writer cuts away, which details are planted early ' +
+                    'to be picked up two hundred pages later.'),
+                p('I keep a single page of notes for each of the five in the back of my commonplace book, and ' +
+                    'I add a dated line to it every year. The lines for *A Month in the Country* now run from ' +
+                    '2016 to 2025. Reading them in order is a little like reading a diary kept by a patient, ' +
+                    'slightly slower version of myself.'),
+                p('By February I am hungry for something new, and the new books benefit from the wait. I ' +
+                    'read them with more attention after a month of watching how the old ones work.'),
+            ],
+        },
+        {
+            title: 'A desk with almost nothing on it',
+            slug: 'a-desk-with-almost-nothing-on-it',
+            topic: 'Habits',
+            excerpt: 'Every version of my desk that lasted more than a few weeks had fewer things on it than the one before.',
+            publishedAt: '2025-04-06T08:20:00.000Z',
+            cover: 'desk',
+            categorySlug: 'writing',
+            tagSlugs: ['habits', 'attention'],
+            body: () => [
+                p('For years I rebuilt my desk every time I read a good account of how somebody else works. ' +
+                    'A monitor arm, a better lamp, a keyboard that clicked in a satisfying way. Each change ' +
+                    'brought a week of feeling organised and then a slow return to the same unfinished drafts.'),
+                p('The desk I have now has stayed the same for two years, which is a record. It is a plain ' +
+                    'white table by the window with a laptop, two notebooks, a pen and a small plant that has ' +
+                    'survived by being ignored. Everything else lives in a drawer I have to stand up to open.'),
+                h2('The drawer rule'),
+                p('The drawer is the whole system. Anything I want on the desk has to earn its place by being ' +
+                    'taken out of the drawer at least once a day for a week. Headphones failed. A second ' +
+                    'monitor failed within two days. The notebooks have never once been put away.'),
+                p('It works because a clear desk asks nothing of me when I sit down. I do not have to decide ' +
+                    'what to deal with first. The only object that asks for attention is the notebook on the ' +
+                    'left, which holds yesterday’s last line.'),
+                h2('What stayed'),
+                bullet('A laptop with the brightness turned down and no notifications from nine to twelve.'),
+                bullet('A spiral notebook for the day’s work, and a bound one for anything worth keeping.'),
+                bullet('One pen, a cheap one I can replace from any corner shop.'),
+                bullet('A lamp for winter afternoons, which lives in the drawer from April to October.'),
+                p('The window matters more than anything on the desk. It faces a row of back gardens, and in ' +
+                    'the mornings I watch the light move across them while I wait for the first sentence. I ' +
+                    'used to count that as time lost. I now think it is the part of the morning when the ' +
+                    'sentence is being written somewhere I cannot see.'),
+                p('I have no advice about equipment. The desk that works is the one you stop noticing, and ' +
+                    'for me that happened only when there was almost nothing left on it to notice.'),
+            ],
+        },
+        {
+            title: 'Forty notebooks',
+            slug: 'forty-notebooks',
+            topic: 'Notebooks',
+            excerpt: 'Fourteen years of notebooks fill a shelf and a half. This autumn I read all forty in order, and they turned out to contain something other than ideas.',
+            publishedAt: '2025-11-09T08:05:00.000Z',
+            cover: 'notebooks',
+            categorySlug: 'writing',
+            tagSlugs: ['notebooks', 'habits'],
+            body: () => [
+                p('In September I took every notebook I have filled since 2011 down from the shelf and read ' +
+                    'them in order. There are forty. It took most of five weeks, an hour or so each evening, ' +
+                    'and it was the most useful thing I have done for my writing in years, though very little ' +
+                    'of that use was the kind I expected.'),
+                p('I had imagined finding ideas I had forgotten, and there were a few. What I mostly found was ' +
+                    'a record of how I work, kept without my noticing that I was keeping it.'),
+                h2('What is in them'),
+                p('The first eleven are the same size, a pocket format with squared paper that I bought in ' +
+                    'packs of three. After that the sizes wander. There is a large sketchbook from 2016 that I ' +
+                    'used for exactly one month, a run of cheap exercise books from the year I was trying to ' +
+                    'spend less, and, since 2020, a steady line of plain A5 notebooks with a stitched binding ' +
+                    'that lies flat.'),
+                p('Across all forty, the pages fall into four kinds.'),
+                bullet('Lists of things to write about, most of which I never wrote.'),
+                bullet('Passages copied from books, until 2015, when they moved to a book of their own.'),
+                bullet('Drafts of openings, often five or six versions of one first paragraph.'),
+                bullet('Records of ordinary days: when I started, where I was, what got in the way.'),
+                p('I would have guessed that the lists and the openings were the valuable part. They are the ' +
+                    'least interesting. The records of ordinary days are what I could not stop reading.'),
+                p('There are gaps, too. Notebook nineteen covers eleven months of 2018, and when I reached it ' +
+                    'I remembered why: it was the year my father was ill, and I wrote in it only on the train ' +
+                    'to the hospital in Wakefield. Those pages are short and very plain, and some of the best ' +
+                    'sentences in all forty are on them.'),
+                h2('The days I actually wrote'),
+                p('From about 2014 I noted the time and the place at the top of each page. I did it to feel ' +
+                    'accountable. Read together, those small headers make a map of when the writing happened.'),
+                p('It happened in the morning, before nine, far more often than I believed. It happened on ' +
+                    'trains out of all proportion to the time I spent on them. It almost never happened in the ' +
+                    'evenings I set aside for it, and it did not happen once in the three months of 2017 when ' +
+                    'I rented a room specifically to write in.'),
+                quote('The notebooks remember my working life more accurately than I do, because they were written before I had a story about it.'),
+                p('I had a story about that room for years. I thought of it as a good period. The notebook ' +
+                    'from those months is mostly lists of what I meant to do the next day, in increasingly ' +
+                    'neat handwriting.'),
+                h2('Handwriting as a gauge'),
+                p('The handwriting became the most reliable signal in the whole set. When I was writing well, ' +
+                    'the pages are messy: crossed out, arrowed, a sentence squeezed sideways into the margin. ' +
+                    'When I was avoiding the work, the pages are tidy and the lists are long. I now look at the ' +
+                    'week’s pages on Friday afternoons for exactly this reason. Neat pages mean something is ' +
+                    'wrong.'),
+                p('It also shows the moment a piece takes hold. There is a page in notebook twenty-six where ' +
+                    'the notes for an essay about my grandfather’s allotment stop being notes and become ' +
+                    'sentences, halfway down, in the middle of a thought. The pen changes too. I must have gone ' +
+                    'to find a better one.'),
+                h2('The ideas that did survive'),
+                p('A few ideas did come back from the shelf, and the way they came back was instructive. ' +
+                    'Notebook seven, from 2013, has a line at the bottom of a page that reads, in full: the ' +
+                    'walk is the draft. I wrote it on a bench by the canal and did nothing with it for eleven ' +
+                    'years. It became the essay about the long way to the library, and when I wrote that essay ' +
+                    'I had no memory of the line at all.'),
+                p('The same thing happened three more times. Each idea that turned into a finished piece ' +
+                    'appears in the notebooks at least twice, years apart and in different words, as if I had ' +
+                    'to arrive at it more than once before it would stay. The ideas I wrote down only once, ' +
+                    'however excited the handwriting, came to nothing.'),
+                p('It has made me calmer about forgetting. An idea that is going to matter will turn up ' +
+                    'again, and the notebook’s job is to catch it when it does.'),
+                h2('What I changed'),
+                p('Reading them has changed three things about how I work, all of them small.'),
+                numbered('I write the time and place at the top of every page again. I drifted out of it around ' +
+                    '2021, and the notebooks from those years are much harder to read back.'),
+                numbered('I protect mornings and trains, and I no longer plan writing evenings. The evidence ' +
+                    'against them is fourteen years deep.'),
+                numbered('I stopped keeping lists of ideas. Anything that matters comes back on its own, usually ' +
+                    'within a month, and the lists mostly recorded what I felt guilty about.'),
+                p('I also numbered the spines at last, with a white pencil. Forty is a satisfying number to ' +
+                    'reach and a slightly alarming number to see on a shelf. The forty-first is on the desk as ' +
+                    'I write this, a third full, with this essay’s first opening on page six.'),
+                rule(),
+                h2('Notes'),
+                numbered('The squared paper was the right choice and I should never have left it. Lines impose a ' +
+                    'size on handwriting that squares do not.'),
+                numbered('Several readers have asked which notebooks I use. It changes with whatever the stationer ' +
+                    'on the corner stocks, which may be why they get filled: none of them feels too good to ' +
+                    'write in.'),
+            ],
+        },
+        {
+            title: 'Letter: the slow week',
+            slug: 'letter-the-slow-week',
+            topic: 'Habits',
+            excerpt: 'Snow closed the line to York for five days, and the unplanned mornings turned into the most rested writing I have done this year.',
+            publishedAt: '2026-02-15T07:30:00.000Z',
+            categorySlug: 'letters',
+            tagSlugs: ['habits', 'attention'],
+            body: ({ media }) => [
+                p('Snow closed the line to York for five days last week, and the press told those of us who ' +
+                    'commute to stay at home. I had a draft due at the end of the month and a plan to write it ' +
+                    'in the evenings. Instead I had five empty mornings and no train.'),
+                p('The first day was wasted, cheerfully. I made coffee slowly, read the Saturday paper on a ' +
+                    'Monday, and walked to the end of the street to look at the canal, which had frozen at ' +
+                    'the edges. On the second day I sat down at nine out of habit and wrote for three hours ' +
+                    'without noticing the time.'),
+                ...figure(media['pour-over'], 'The coffee that sets the pace of a slow morning. It takes about four minutes, which is roughly how long a first sentence takes.'),
+                p('By Friday the draft was finished, a fortnight early, which has never happened before. I ' +
+                    'have been trying to work out what was different, and the honest answer is almost nothing ' +
+                    'apart from the timetable. Every morning was the same length, and nothing was waiting at ' +
+                    'the end of it.'),
+                p('I cannot make every week a snow week, but I have kept one thing from it. On the two days ' +
+                    'I work from home, the first hour now has no fixed end. When the sentence is ready I start, ' +
+                    'and when it is not I make another coffee. So far it has not cost me a single deadline.'),
+                p('The line reopened on Monday. The train was full of people describing their own slow weeks, ' +
+                    'and I suspect a few of them are also trying to work out how to keep one.'),
+            ],
+        },
+        {
+            title: 'Reading on the 7:52',
+            slug: 'reading-on-the-752',
+            topic: 'Trains',
+            excerpt: 'Three mornings a week, twenty-five minutes from Leeds to York. Over six years that train has become the best reading room I know, for reasons that have little to do with the view.',
+            publishedAt: '2026-05-31T08:40:00.000Z',
+            cover: 'platform',
+            categorySlug: 'reading',
+            tagSlugs: ['trains', 'attention'],
+            body: () => [
+                p('Three mornings a week I take the 7:52 from Leeds to York. It is a twenty-five minute ' +
+                    'journey, a little longer when the train waits outside Church Fenton for a freight service ' +
+                    'to clear, and over six years it has become the place where I do most of my reading. I ' +
+                    'worked it out last month: something over three hundred hours, which at my pace is about ' +
+                    'forty-five books.'),
+                p('The train has no particular virtue as a place. It is a three-carriage unit that is usually ' +
+                    'too warm and sometimes too full. What it has is a structure nothing else in my week offers: ' +
+                    'a fixed start, a fixed end, and nothing I am allowed to do in between.'),
+                h2('A reading room with a timetable'),
+                p('Most advice about reading more is advice about finding time, and time was never my ' +
+                    'problem. I have plenty of evenings with an hour free. What those evenings lack is a ' +
+                    'boundary. At home an hour of reading is an hour I could spend on something else, and the ' +
+                    'book has to win that argument every few pages.'),
+                p('On the train the argument is over before it starts. There is nowhere to go, the work will ' +
+                    'not begin until York, and twenty-five minutes is long enough to read a chapter and short ' +
+                    'enough that I never feel I ought to be doing something more serious with it.'),
+                quote('On the train the book does not have to win an argument with the rest of my life.'),
+                h2('What I read there'),
+                p('After the first year I noticed that I choose train books differently. They are rarely the ' +
+                    'books I most want to read. They have sections short enough to survive an announcement ' +
+                    'about the next station, and they are long enough to last a few weeks, so that the book ' +
+                    'becomes part of the journey.'),
+                bullet('Collections of essays, which end before York more often than chapters do.'),
+                bullet('Long novels in short chapters. Dickens, written for monthly parts, is ideal.'),
+                bullet('Books about places, read while passing through a different one.'),
+                bullet('Anything I would feel self-conscious reading at home, which mostly means poetry.'),
+                p('What I do not read on the train is anything for work. The press sends manuscripts as files, ' +
+                    'and in the first month I made a rule that the laptop stays in the bag until the platform ' +
+                    'at York. I have broken it perhaps five times, each time because I had to, and each time ' +
+                    'the rest of the day felt slightly shorter.'),
+                h2('Paper, mostly'),
+                p('I read paper on the train. I tried an e-reader for most of 2022, and it was lighter, it ' +
+                    'held more, and I read less. A book on a screen is one tap away from the next book, and on ' +
+                    'a twenty-five minute journey I spent too many of those minutes choosing.'),
+                p('A paperback has the advantage of being only itself. It keeps a record, too: a ticket used ' +
+                    'as a bookmark, a coffee ring from a morning the carriage lurched at Micklefield, a corner ' +
+                    'turned down at the paragraph I meant to copy out when I reached my desk. Some of the books ' +
+                    'are now inseparable from the line.'),
+                bullet('*Bleak House*, over eleven weeks in the winter of 2021, a chapter a journey, which is still ' +
+                    'far quicker than its first readers had it.'),
+                bullet('*The Old Ways*, by Robert Macfarlane, in the spring of 2023, while the fields outside turned ' +
+                    'from brown to green.'),
+                bullet('Montaigne’s essays, in a thick paperback that has travelled to York about two hundred times ' +
+                    'and is still not finished.'),
+                h2('The company'),
+                p('The 7:52 has regulars. A man in a green coat does the cryptic crossword and finishes it, as ' +
+                    'far as I can tell, every day before Garforth. A student reads law textbooks with a ' +
+                    'highlighter in each hand. For three years a woman opposite me read the same thick ' +
+                    'paperback, and I never found out what it was, because she kept a paper cover on it.'),
+                p('Nobody speaks. A carriage of people reading in silence has a particular quality, and I have ' +
+                    'come to think it does some of the work. It is easier to keep your attention when everyone ' +
+                    'around you is keeping theirs.'),
+                h2('Evenings are different'),
+                p('The 17:20 home is a different train. It is fuller, people are tired, and the journey that ' +
+                    'carries me to York so easily is somehow longer in the other direction. I have stopped ' +
+                    'trying to read on it. I look out at the fields past Church Fenton and let the day’s ' +
+                    'manuscript settle.'),
+                p('For a long time I counted that as time wasted. The notebooks disagree: a surprising number ' +
+                    'of first lines are dated in the evening, on the 17:20, somewhere between York and Leeds.'),
+                p('If I left the press tomorrow, the train is what I would miss. I have wondered whether I ' +
+                    'could recreate it at a kitchen table, with a fixed twenty-five minutes, a book chosen for ' +
+                    'the purpose and the laptop in another room. I suspect the timetable is doing more than I ' +
+                    'could reproduce. For now I am glad of the 7:52, delays and all.'),
+                rule(),
+                h2('Notes'),
+                numbered('My pace is about forty pages an hour for fiction, and closer to twenty-five for anything ' +
+                    'with footnotes.'),
+                numbered('The man in the green coat was absent for most of March. He came back in April with a new ' +
+                    'coat, also green.'),
+            ],
+        },
+        {
+            title: 'Letter: what I read in August',
+            slug: 'letter-what-i-read-in-august',
+            topic: 'Rereading',
+            excerpt: 'A month with fewer trains and more time in the garden: three books finished, one abandoned, and a note on reading slowly in the heat.',
+            publishedAt: '2026-08-30T07:00:00.000Z',
+            categorySlug: 'letters',
+            tagSlugs: ['rereading', 'trains'],
+            body: () => [
+                p('August is the quietest month at the press, and I took the train only four times. The ' +
+                    'reading moved to the garden, where it is slower, because there is always a reason to look ' +
+                    'up.'),
+                bullet('*The Peregrine*, by J. A. Baker. A single winter of watching falcons in Essex, written so ' +
+                    'intensely that I could manage only ten pages at a time. I finished it over three weeks and ' +
+                    'would not have wanted it faster.'),
+                bullet('*Wanderlust*, by Rebecca Solnit. A history of walking I had meant to read for years. The ' +
+                    'chapters on walking in cities gave me the start of an essay about the canal, which may ' +
+                    'appear here in the autumn.'),
+                bullet('*Stoner*, by John Williams. A reread, the fourth. Every time I notice a different kindness ' +
+                    'in it.'),
+                bullet('A novel I abandoned at page ninety. I will not name it, because the fault was probably the ' +
+                    'weather.'),
+                p('Reading in the heat taught me something the notebooks already knew. I read better in ' +
+                    'short sittings with a clear end, and in the garden there is no York to arrive at. So I ' +
+                    'started setting a timer for thirty minutes, which felt ridiculous for about two days and ' +
+                    'then felt like the train.'),
+                p('September brings the timetable back, and the 7:52 with it. The first train book of the ' +
+                    'autumn is already in my bag: a collection of essays short enough to finish before York.'),
+                p('As ever, replies to this letter come straight to me. Two of this month’s books were ' +
+                    'suggestions from readers, and I am grateful for both.'),
+            ],
+        },
+    ],
+};
+//# sourceMappingURL=blog-copy-en.js.map