January may be the beginning of things, but I’ve long maintained that it’s September that holds the propulsion of new projects best. And so it was, on a languid Friday afternoon - the second in September - that something new wandered into my life.

“Oh by the way,” wrote Charlotte, “if you would ever like to start a books/writing podcast with someone, I have a dearly held dream to start one.”

I replied, we’d been chatting anyway. “I am hard to work with / have stupidly high standards / outsource all production, I will caveat.

But it could be really gooooood.”

Two months later and we’d booked our first guest of a swelling first season in.

Charlotte Runcie and I met as cub reporters on the arts desk of The Telegraph. We’d take rare lunch breaks and sit in the park, we’d be the only women propping up the bar in the Belgravian pub our colleagues made our local. Over the past decade we’ve written books and got married and had children and moved away and moved back and lost people and ripped some things up and started again. Months have passed when we’ve not spoken, but then we would pop up again in one another’s lives: a handful of narcissus bulbs here, a box of brownies through the post there. Charlotte’s name and kind words graces the back - and the acknowledgements pages - of my books. Solidarity, sympathy, always.

There’s nobody I’d rather have made In Haste with, a new podcast - and Substack - that explores how books really get written. We’ve both spent the past 10 years writing books in the margins of life, in lunch breaks and early mornings and late, late at night. Around grief and joy and honeymoons and hangovers. I think we’d both say we’ve shuffled away from journalism and into full-time writing now (journalism is writing but for me they hold different spaces), and we know first-hand how hard that has been and how much of a luxury it is. We spend a lot of time talking about writing, in voicenotes while we’re making the kids’ tea or on the way back from the supermarket, and we thought it might be fun to talk to other people about that, too.

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In our first season we interview the people who massively inspired our own work and who we turn to first on the bookshelves: Amy Liptrot, Thomas Morris, Sophie Mackintosh, Cathy Rentzenbrick, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Emilia Hart, Eliza Clarke - to name a handful. We recorded in nap times. We set up a company before dawn broke. We got to grips with fancy microphones. We commissioned music and artwork. We have an incredibly patient producer. We wrangled with the internet. We made a podcast.

Listen now · 2:18

And we realised pretty quickly that we had more to say than those episodes would allow, so we brought In Haste to Substack, too. There we will be reflecting on the themes of each episode, from keeping diaries to writing through bereavement. If you love reading and you’re fascinated by writing, if you’re working on your own work and want to share, if you’re simply a person who would love to create more but has, well, life stuff to do, it’s probably a space you’d enjoy. It’s so cool to finally be sharing what we’ve been up to.