A New Tack For 2025

Pull up a chair, and let's chat.

I was going through some end-of-year journalling prompts when I realised this: I’ve been putting time and energy into writing here on Substack as a sort of ‘productive procrastination’ of the creative writing projects I actually want to work on.

Previous newsletters have included allusions to novel projects and ‘writing news’, but the truth is that unless I put real energy - and time - into my fiction, it’ll never make it from my Google Docs to the shelves of Waterstones. Fiction writing is scary, and intimidating, and a long-term project without any guarantee of completion. So it’s easy to understand why I’ve thrown energy into my Substack instead… But in ten years, I’d rather have made a really good go at the novel-writing thing than have a perfect newsletter sending history.

So it’s time for a new approach to how I spend my creative energy.

Learning to paint roses

I’ve paused paid subscriptions indefinitely and taken the paywall off the archive of posts here. I’ll still aim to come and let you know what I’ve been up to (there’s a huge summary of all the books I read in 2024 in the works) but without keeping the same posting rhythm and structure as I’ve had lately.

Speak soon,

Lily