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SoulSanctuaryHub

@divinesubstance.bsky.social
60 followers 45 following 813 posts

Writer of quiet stories about belief, kindness, and the unseen threads that connect us. Soulful narratives. UK based. Short fiction. Rest. Refresh. Rise

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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 4m
I love it when a paragraph you've wrestled with for days finally falls into place. Suddenly there's nothing to fix. The characters are breathing, the room has come alive, and you can almost hear the story moving. Then you turn the page and find another paragraph waiting to be rescued. 😊
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 8m
And the third step is to make a cup of tea, suddenly remember something fascinating about Victorian drainage systems, and convince yourself that three hours of research is practically the same as writing. Particularly when you're writing a historical novel.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 23h
Somewhere, a reader is waiting for a book that hasn't been written yet. Not another version of a story they already know. Yours. And they won't know what was missing until they find it. Perhaps today is the day to write the first few lines.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 23h
The mind still wants to conquer the world. The lovely thing about age is realising the world will still be there after breakfast.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Isn't it extraordinary that someone can invent an entire life, put it between two covers, and leave us carrying something of it long after we've closed the book? People we've never met. Places we've never stood. And somehow, something of ourselves waiting there too.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
I've always thought there's something rather important about a book that makes us uncomfortable.,It asks us to spend time in a life we might never have understood, with thoughts we might never have entertained. Imagine what we lose when someone else decides which stories we're allowed to encounter.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Happy 50th! 🎂 There's something wonderful about arriving at an age when we're supposed to have become someone, only to discover how much of ourselves is still waiting to emerge. Five books later, you're rather beautifully proving the point. ❤️
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Three in the morning. A small head against your chest. The quiet wondering whether everyone else is finding this easier. "The First Year" offers stories and gentle reflections for those hours, and for the changing days beyond them. www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0HGQFCGY...
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
And the moment you walk away from the desk, the entire missing paragraph arrives fully formed. Usually when you're making a cup of tea, with neither pen nor paper in sight. I'm beginning to suspect the imagination has a rather wicked sense of humour. 😄
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
A weekly place to pause · Check it out on Substack with love from www.soulsanctuaryhub.com and @soulsanctuaryhub-k3y
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
And in another timeline, I’m coming home to a quiet house at the edge of a forest, with a writing room full of books, a fire already lit, and no reason to be anywhere else.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Sometimes the interesting part is not what happened to the writer, but what stayed. A smell. A sentence. A room. The way someone left. Years later, it turns up in a story wearing different clothes.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
There is something about Halloween that lets the world become slightly less sensible for a night. We tolerate shadows, old stories, strange noises, half-believed things. Maybe that is part of the pleasure — giving imagination permission to misbehave a little.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
The First Year is a book of stories, myths and gentle wisdom for the woman becoming mother. Something she can open in a quiet moment, with room for her wonder, her weariness, and the person she is still becoming. A thoughtful gift for an expectant or new mother. www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0HGQFCGY...
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Between shifts. Between emails. Between other people needing something. Between the version of you who earns a living and the one quietly making a book.Sometimes the real writing life is not a room of one’s own.It is protecting a small piece of yourself from being used up before you get to the page.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Ha — that is exactly the kind of answer I’d want ready in my pocket. There’s something very funny about how quickly “author” gets translated into “famous author”. Most of us are just quietly delighted someone we’ve never met chose to spend a few hours inside a world we made.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
We spend so much of parenting preparing them to grow up, and then every now and again you get an evening that quietly reminds you they are still your child too.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I can understand why that feeling came up.Sharing the life you went on to have does not take anything away from them. If anything, it lets their family see that the person who loved them then still carries them now.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Sometimes the dream is not “successful” - It's waking up with enough of the day still belonging to you that the work can become what it might have been without constantly being squeezed around everything else.Maybe what many writers are really longing for is not success.It is uninterrupted becoming.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
There are some doors the past can open without warning. To be asked for those photographs after all these years must bring so much back at once. The person they were, the person you were then, & everything that never got another day.I hope sharing those brings some tenderness with the ache.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Walking away from something I had worked hard for taught me sometimes the learning is not in enduring more but recognising when staying would cost too much of who I now was. My choice looked like an ending from the outside, but inside, it was the first honest direction I had taken in a long time.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
There comes a moment when even the thing that hurts no longer has the power to turn you around. It still lands. You still feel it. But somewhere underneath, something in you has already packed its bags.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
That is a very specific kind of victory.😂 And I love that three of the remaining emails are from you to you — apparently even Inbox Zero still leaves room for unfinished conversations with ourselves.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
That kind of permission reaches much further than the moment. A child who is not hurried out of sadness may grow into a man who knows he does not have to hide from it.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
You can spend months wondering whether a book disappeared the moment you released it.Then an email arrives from someone who has underlined a sentence or seen themselves somewhere in the pages.And for a moment, the distance between writer and reader disappears.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Go with "37" No sensible reason. It just feels like the sort of number that might have been waiting quietly for its turn. And there is something rather lovely about letting chance choose the next door.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I kind of sank into my couch and got some love from my beagle - heaven !!
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Maybe the part I like most is that a new page does not have to mean a dramatic reinvention. Sometimes it is one different choice. One conversation you finally have. One thing you stop postponing. A life can turn quietly.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I woke up like that today too — full of plans, moving faster than sense, delighted with myself. Then suddenly: absolutely nothing left in the cupboard. Energy can be such a terrible liar about how long it plans to stay.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
‘Community & Connection’ A monthly letter from Joanne, October 2026. Opening Ritual Before you read on, make yourself something warm to hold.... soulsanctuaryhub.com/2026/10/01/com…
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Plot Nineteen The key had lived on the hook by the back door for thirty-one years, and for seven months Edie Rowcroft had not touched it.... soulsanctuaryhub.com/2026/10/01/plo…
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Noticing the Community You Already Belong To There is a woman at the bus stop. You probably have one too. Not the same woman, but her equivalent....
soulsanctuaryhub.com
Noticing the Community You Already Belong To
There is a woman at the bus stop. You probably have one too. Not the same woman, but her equivalent. The man who walks the same spaniel past your window at twenty past eight. The girl at the pharmacy counter who says "the usual?" before you've opened your mouth. The neighbour whose name you've never quite caught, but whose Christmas lights you'd notice if they didn't go up.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Sometimes the tears come before you even know what the book has touched. You are still on the same page. The room is unchanged. Nothing dramatic has happened. But something in you has recognised itself.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Writing is strange employment.No interview room. No manager. Just unseen people choosing the book, reading it, returning for more. The joy is still in the making. Always.But there is something quietly extraordinary about discovering that those invisible readers are paying to keep the work alive.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The 600th rejection maybe landed while the kettle was boiling. Read the first line,then the second. Stood there feeling foolish for having hoped this one might be different.Later, you opened the submissions folder again. Deep breath - this time..your work needs to be heard - keep going - please!
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
And you will ..........😊
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I think the difficult part is recognising that the discarded ideas were not wasted.Sometimes they are what teach us the shape of the final piece.Writing is full of invisible work.All the sentences, directions & possibilities that never make it onto the page, but still help us arrive there.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
There’s a peculiar comfort in knowing the book is still waiting for you tomorrow. Frustrating, yes — but also proof the conversation with it isn’t over yet.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
And perhaps the lovely part is that readers never love them in quite the same way we do. They notice different things, forgive different flaws, attach themselves to unexpected moments. We create the characters. Then readers begin knowing them for themselves.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The work begins deeply private, then has to pass through other people’s filters on what they think they can sell.Perhaps the real challenge is learning to let the work enter that system without allowing the system to become the final authority on what the work is worth.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
There’s something lovely about stories written at different times finally getting to meet each other.I imagine the collection will reveal connections you couldn’t have planned when you wrote them separately — recurring questions, obsessions, images, even versions of yourself.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
That would undo me a little. Someone still reading at 3am because they weren’t ready to leave the book yet — what a lovely email to wake up to. ❤️
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
There’s something lovely about carrying one place into another like that — Provence into a rainy New York morning, not as escape, but as a little shift in atmosphere. Books do that too. They let one landscape quietly alter the weather inside another.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Sometimes the surprise is the right book is not the one we would have chosen for them.The hook might be a voice, mood, single character, a sentence that feels oddly familiar.Maybe becoming a reader begins less with loving books in general, and more with finding one book that feels like it knew you.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Sometimes rereading is less about studying technique and more about recalibrating the ear.A good short story reminds you how much can be implied, how little can be enough, where silence can do more than explanation.Sometimes one simple sentence makes you return to your own page differently.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Sometimes the relief is not that the stress goes. It is that, for a little while, it stops being the only thing taking up space. A river gives the mind something else to belong to.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Strong at the back, apparently. Bit slow on the turn. 🦖⚽
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Sometimes we are simply too close to our own work to see it clearly.That's why a thoughtful reader can matter so much. Not because they tell us if the work is good, but because they return something we had lost sight of while making it.A little perspective. A little trust. A reason to keep going.
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SoulSanctuaryHub @divinesubstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Sometimes the words that stay are the ones we almost don’t write. The sentence that feels a little too close. The thought we nearly soften. The truth we are tempted to tidy before anyone else sees it. Maybe that is what readers recognise. Not perfection. Presence.
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