Taking a Page from Matthew’s Notebook…

From Matthew Oates’ notebook for BEYOND SPRING – Wanderings through Nature

By the time Matthew and I met at his house, in April, I had already read his manuscript through, plus gone through it sentence-by-sentence, editing it with him. What an absolutely joyous experience that was…. He is such a pleasure to work alongside and his words and the spirit behind his words are absolutely wonderful.

So imagine how I felt when we met face-to-face for the first time in over a year and he pulled out his notebook – and told me how the small unprepossessing book in front of me holds all the first drafts for this book, Beyond Spring – Wanderings through Nature…

I asked him to photograph a few pages so I would be able to convince myself I had actually seen it; and then he kindly gave me his agreement to share them with you.

So here is one page below… My first thought looking at this today is that it a very good thing that books are printed in type, rather than handwritten as I don’t find his writing easy to decipher. My second thought goes back to a few years ago when I was going through my mother’s stuff, after she had died – and just how powerful handwriting can be

I do hope you enjoy seeing this – as much as I do

Thank you so much for those who have already bought a copy of the hardback version of Beyond Spring – the Hardback version will only ever be available during this Kickstarter campaign here – which has to end on 29th May 2017

And please do pass this on to others – as we still need more wonderful backers to reach our target!

Nadia x