write.
Write is for the whole draft, from the first note to the final edit. It stays out of the way, keeps track of your changes, and plays nicely with the files other people send you.
Chapter Three
The Estuary
The tide leaves the estuary twice a day, and twice a day the estuary pretends it was never there. By seven the mudflats are a country of their own, veined with silver channels, and the wading birds arrive to read them like a page of proofs.
The keeper’s ledger records forty years of this arithmetic in a hand that never hurries.4 Some mornings the entry is a single word. Some mornings it is the weather, the water, and a sentence about the light that has no business in a logbook.
A coast is not a line. It is an argument between two neighbours, renewed every six hours.
We walked the flats until the channel turned and the country closed behind us, quietly, the way a book does.
