Today I wanted to share this: the first finished copy of The House at the Edge of Night, which just arrived from my publishers in the UK. It's a moving moment to see the final book, which holds within its pages all kinds of hopes and expectations, and which contains the sum total of all the writing, redrafting, editing, collaboration, thought and love that have been poured into it - in the case of The House at the Edge of Night - over more than three years. It's definitely been worth the wait.

Producing a book is an intensely collaborative process, so I want to also mention the cover designers behind this beautiful design. The cover was designed by Emma Grey Gelder, and illustrated by Yehrin Tong, and both of them have brought a personal vision to the book which I think is just breathtaking. If you want to see more, Yehrin has a website here where you can view more of her beautiful and hypnotic spiral designs. I love the work of art they have made out of the book and I hope you do too!

Last week I launched a project on Instagram called #yearinthelifeofawriter. It started out as a personal experiment in telling stories through social media, so I've been surprised by the number of people for whom the idea of chronicling a writing life a day at a time seems to have struck a chord. So this week I thought I’d share some more information about what the project is, how I'm doing it, and where you can join in. Here are the questions people have been asking so far!

I’m new to the #yearinthelifeofawriter project? What is it?
Each day, I post one photo and a brief caption to Instagram here, mostly related to what it's like to be a writer or to interesting things I've seen that day and want to share. So far the story has featured pizza, immigration offices, insomnia, going back to night school to learn Italian, and about 276 shots of my desk (see below)…

Why are you taking a photo every day, rather than just sharing the exciting things that happen during the year?
I like many things about social media, but I feel that sometimes there is a certain pressure to share only those aspects of our lives which seem out of the ordinary. And over time, this distorts our picture of what it’s actually like to do certain long-term things like be a mother or a father or a carer or a friend, or study or overcome personal difficulties or write a book. I love the way photographers have embraced the everyday via concepts like Project 365, and I think that as writers we could also do more to share the ordinary and beautiful things we find in our day-to-day life.
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What equipment are you using?
A second-hand digital camera (an Olympus SP-800UZ, in case you were wondering!), a Fairphone 2 and my old but trustworthy Nokia Lumia. I felt strongly that I didn't want to go out and buy a lot of fancy equipment for a project that was meant to be about things like honesty and everyday experience - but having said that, I will do my best not to subject you to awful photos.

Will the project feature photos of you?
I want to show you what being a writer looks like from my point of view, as well as the interesting things I see over the year. So I’ll mostly remain out of the frame. But I might occasionally enlist the help of other people when I’m taking the photos, particularly at book events where there sometimes isn’t time for the writer to take a picture!

​Can I join in?
Of course! Several people have asked me this (and one writer, @hotpotato786 on Instagram, has already shared some brilliant photos). I am honoured that other writers and readers would like to take part. If you want to do a full ‘year in the life’ project, feel free to launch a separate project in your own personal style, with a separate hashtag, just crediting #yearinthelifeofawriter as inspiration. But most people who have contacted me would actually like a way to share occasional photos of their writing life, without having to take a photo a day. And I think it would be wonderful to have a community of different writers – full-time, part-time, aspiring and those who write for fun – sharing honest writing pictures in a variety of personal styles over the coming year. So, if you want to join in, use the hashtag #yearinthelifeofawriter too when uploading your photos, so that we can find and follow each other's writing stories.

You can follow the project here. And if you don’t have Instagram, I've created a simple photo blog where all the pictures and captions can be found on Tumblr here.

I hope you enjoy the project. And let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see included over the coming weeks and months...

Today I'm very pleased to announce a new project. Starting today, and for the next 365 days, I am going to attempt to honestly document a year in the life of a writer. Each day I’ll take one photograph, write something about it, and upload it to Instagram under the hashtag #yearinthelifeofawriter (as well as sharing updates via my author Facebook and Twitter and here on my blog, for anyone who wants to follow along but doesn't use Instagram). This is a project I've been thinking about for a long time. I feel very strongly that one of the best things about the internet is how we are using it to find new ways to tell stories, and I wanted to see if, through photos, a new kind of story about writing could be told.

Because I think as writers we don't talk enough, or honestly enough, about the day to day detail of what our job involves. One of the questions I often get asked, even by people who know me well, is what it’s actually like to be a writer. Do we get bored? Do we get lonely? Do we get to go to glamorous book parties? Where do we find ideas, if we’re shut up at our desks writing all the time? I struggle to answer these kinds of questions because I’m not sure I know myself what it means to talk about ‘being a writer’. And yet there is a lot which can be said about it. I constantly find myself hoarding scraps of knowledge about other writers’ lives: how they work, the spaces they write in, the creative processes by which they develop their ideas.

About a year ago, this survey found that 60% of British people see writing as a dream job, while meanwhile Sebastian Faulks was soliciting in the Spectator for any other job but writing: ‘I have now spent almost a quarter of a century alone in a garret staring at a blank wall,’ he wrote, ‘and I think it has driven me a bit mad’. It's moments like this, when the stories we tell about writing seem to differ so wildly, that I wonder whether we as writers and readers could talk more openly about the process. Writing, after all, is a job like any other. Was there a way, I began asking myself, to document a writing life in real time, as it happened, in a way that would honestly capture the ups, downs, challenges and moments of inspiration inherent in working alone on a long project? Had any writers found new ways to do this? (And did Sebastian Faulks actually spend most of his time staring at a blank wall?)

Like many writers, I use social media. I think many of us have a natural temptation to follow the lead of Elena Ferrante, but the reality is that the internet has made the process of reading and writing much more democratic. Now, if someone wants to ask a question about one of my books, or I want to read a blog post from another writer about a book I'm looking forward to, it helps to be part of the big conversation which is going on online. But what I've been noticing recently - something I find fascinating - is that people are finding powerful ways to use social media to tell stories. Our lives have become, through the way we use the internet, much more immediate to each other. It's now possible to read the thoughts of bloggers all over the world, chronicling every type of experience, to study candid photographs of strangers in other cities, to follow world events through the voices of those experiencing them first-hand, to see what it's like to do different jobs and to live other lives. Often people are telling these stories not so much in words as in photos, or in a combination of the two, using everyday tools - basic cameras, free apps and an internet connection, to tell a story as candidly as possible as it happens. And I started to wonder whether we as readers and writers could also use social media not just to talk to each other - a great thing in itself - but also to tell stories about our work. This was how project #yearinthelifeofawriter began.

For me, this is an experiment – I don’t know exactly what the story of the next year will be. In the spirit of which, here’s my first photo. This is the board I keep beside my desk, and you can see from the calendar that I know the publication dates for my new book, The House at the Edge of Night, but apart from that, the year ahead is an unwritten story.

You can follow the project here, and I will post updates on this blog as well as Facebook and Twitter. Let me know what you want this project to be. I would appreciate suggestions!