The Fire Horse Was Supposed to Save Me. It Set the Barn on Fire.

I wrote the book on the messy middle. Then I had to live in one. A dispatch from the trenches.

2025 was an annus horribilis. I'm not going to itemise it. It sucked, thoroughly and in several directions at once, and I ended the year upright.

That was the win.

So I did what any reasonable, evidence-based adult woman does after a year like that. I consulted the Chinese zodiac.

2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse. Wild. Unstoppable. Burns down the old, forges the new. I have actual horses. I like actual fire. This felt like a personal message from the universe, addressed to me, possibly signed.

What I skimmed past was the small print. In Japan the Fire Horse is considered so unlucky that in 1966 people quietly stopped having babies rather than risk raising one. Fire Horse years are said to burn through fortunes and good sense.

It wasn't a horoscope. It was a weather warning.

2026 was supposed to be my launch year. I had a new book to put into the world, and a plan for how. Instead, every single week since January has been swallowed by a fire I didn't start.

Fire One: The horse that was never pregnant

In January I bought a beautiful red mare. Of course she was red. Symbolism practically galloped into the sales contract.

She was in foal, they said. Due in May. I paid for two horses and made room in the barn for two horses. Then I waited.

I got a foal alarm, the clever kind that detects when a mare lies flat to give birth and rings your phone immediately. Very sophisticated. It also turns out to be extremely good at detecting horses who simply enjoy sleeping on their sides.

Every night. At three in the morning. For weeks.

I'd wake to a screaming phone, drag boots over pyjamas, sprint across the yard in the pale Norwegian summer twilight, and find my mare peacefully asleep. Not in labour. Just having an excellent night, and faintly annoyed that I'd interrupted it.

May came. May went. June arrived. The alarm kept ringing and I kept running, because what else do you do.

In July I finally had her scanned. There was no foal. There had never been a foal. Weeks of three a.m. sprints across the yard for an animal that didn't exist.

Podcast interviews booked that month: zero.

Fire two: The two farms

We bought a farm. A beautiful one. Four hundred apple trees, all of whom now appear to depend on me for their emotional and agricultural wellbeing.

The plan was simple. Buy the new farm, sell the old farm, move the circus, ride triumphantly into Act Two.

You already know where this is going, because you have met a bureaucrat.

We can't sell the old farm. We are engaged in a slow-motion disagreement with the municipality because years ago we built a small annex on farmland. This apparently ranks somewhere between planning violation and high treason, if treason involved a modest outbuilding and a truly heroic volume of correspondence.

So now we have two farms, one enormous mortgage, four hundred apple trees, one mare who isn't pregnant, a chimenea business, a tick repellent business, and my partner Jan-Erik saying “Det ordner seg” in exactly the tone of a man who isn't remotely certain that everything will, in fact, ordne seg.

Meanwhile my book sits patiently on the desk. The marketing plan is underneath it, quietly ageing.

Fire three: The alpaca

Then one of the alpacas gave birth. Successfully. Actually pregnant, actually a baby, no ultrasound plot twists required.

Then she developed a severe udder infection and her milk supply collapsed. So now the little man runs on supplements: a rich colostrum we buy from a farmer friend and deliver by bottle, several times a day.

He doesn't come when called. He has to be caught. So several times a day two grown adults corner a small woolly animal in a field, present him with expensive colostrum, and wait while he considers the offer entirely on its merits.

Some days he empties the bottle. Some days he looks at the bottle, then at us, and declines.

Nights he still spends with his mother, because the nursing keeps what milk she has coming. Which means the horse who was never pregnant had me up at three in the morning for weeks, and the baby who actually needs feeding doesn't.

I've stopped looking for the logic.

Meanwhile, in my ears

Through all of this I have been listening to marketing podcasts while mucking out stables, feeding animals, walking the dog and pulling weeds. Confident people with excellent microphones explaining the importance of visibility. Consistency. Building your audience. Showing up every day.

On the subject of showing up consistently: these Chronicles are supposed to appear every tuesday.

It is friday. I refer you to Fires One through Three.

There is a very particular flavour of madness in being lectured about visibility while you are pulling nettles behind a barn you can't legally sell.

This is not a memoir

Most people write about the messy middle afterwards. Once it's over, once the story has acquired a satisfying moral, once they can sit comfortably in a nice chair and explain what it all meant.

I am writing from the trenches, in muddy boots.

I have written two books about navigating exactly this sort of chaos, Screw the Script and Torch the Script. People sometimes ask whether the tools really work.

They do. They just don't make any of it pretty.

There is no workbook in the world that stops your horse from not being pregnant. There is no journalling exercise that persuades a municipality to answer emails faster. There is no affirmation powerful enough to prevent mastitis in an alpaca.

The tools don't remove the fire. They stop you pouring gasoline on it. At three in the morning, that is the entire job. And the tool that has carried me furthest isn't even in the books.

Laugh.

Not because everything is fine. Not because you're healed. Not because you've magically reframed your suffering into a beautiful lesson. Laugh because standing in the wreckage and finding the not-pregnant horse absurdly funny is what gets you across the yard again tomorrow.

Why I write these Chronicles

The books are the method. The Chronicles are me stress-testing that method in real time. No polished ending, no five-step success story. Just one week after another, trying the tools on real life and reporting honestly on what happens.

Sometimes the lesson comes from a horse. Sometimes from a bureaucrat. Sometimes from an alpaca with terrible timing. Sometimes from a marketing plan gathering dust while life demands something else entirely.

If your own year feels like it's on fire, come and read along. There is comfort in knowing that somewhere in Norway there is a woman chasing a baby alpaca around a field with a bottle he may or may not want, beside a horse who was never pregnant, trying to launch a book about surviving chaos.

And somehow, still laughing.

And the Fire Horse? It really did set the barn on fire.

Anyway. The alpaca needs catching. The horse still isn't pregnant.

Skål.