Dear friend,

Welcome to the back room.

This is the first Lamplight - the monthly companion piece that I send to paid subscribers of Two Lamps. It will arrive on the first Tuesday of every month, and it will cover the previous month’s stories. Some months that means four stories. Some months that means five. This month, we have four: The Library at Echt, The Tower at Beaurevoir, The Express to Euston, and The Hour Before Dawn at the Tower. They began just over three weeks ago. They feel older than three weeks. Writing has its own time, and I have spent more hours inside the cells and libraries and train compartments and prison towers of these four stories than the calendar would suggest.

I want to use Lamplight for what footnotes and source bibliographies cannot do. I want to tell you what it has been like to write these. What I cut. What surprised me. What I learned about the saints I thought I already knew. What I am beginning to suspect about the project itself, now that it is running and I can feel its shape. I will tell you about the historical sources where they matter. I will not pretend the writing process is more orderly than it has been. I have been a deacon for some years and I have learned that the people who pay for the back room of anything are the people who want to see how the work is actually done, not the people who want a polished version of it. So I will not polish.

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