“Never Let Them Steal Your Dreams”

Goals, and plans, and intentions for the new year

(Don’t worry, it’s not the 24th already, I’m sending this a day early because Sunday this week is Christmas Eve!).

• 📰 Guardian Blind Date - this week’s date between Adam and Rachel was a total delight. Just two people who seem unabashedly enthusiastic about each other. More of this please, universe!

• 🧁 Nigel Slater’s mincemeat slice. Now, I’d have called this a mince pie cake, but I made Nigel Slater’s mincemeat slice for my board game group’s Christmas party last week and it went down extremely well, even with an avowed mince pie hater. We have a couple of vegans in the group, so I doubled the Allplants basic sponge cake recipe as the base, but followed the principles and instructions in Slater’s original.

• 📕 Writers and Lovers - Lily King. This book has been on my radar (and my Kindle) for ages, so I finally got my ass in gear and put it on my list of 10 books I wanted to read before the end of 2023. It was fabulous. The book is about living the writing life, and putting love out into the world, and figuring out how to get love back into your life and what’s most important to you. Also, on a more quotidian level, there’s a ‘writing festival’ towards the end of the book which has loads of really interesting ideas about writing that I’d love to use as prompts and starting points for my own creativity, so I’ll be coming back to those!

We all have our own parts of the internet. Whether due to the TikTok algorithm, who we choose to follow, or our own interests, all our feeds are a little bit different. In my part of the blogosphere, December tends to mean two types of content: favourite things and reflections from the past year (here are some of mine; books are coming next week), and plans and hopes for the year ahead. 

The most important thing: we are now past the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere!

Friend of the Substack, Louise Tilbrook (get to know her more here) started a conversation about planning - or not planning - the year ahead. 

Daisy Buchanan also wrote a lovely piece about making wishes, and setting out our dreams, which reminded me of something I’d thought while watching the new Wonka film. A theme throughout the film is going after your dreams, and there’s lots of dialogue about how important dreams are. Something that wasn’t in the film, but which I thought while watching it, was this: there’s no such thing as a stupid dream. One of my dreams is this: to make writing a really big, chunky, part of my life.

For the last few years, I’ve been setting words of the year, to remind me how I want to engage with the world and lead my life in the coming year. 2023 was ‘gentle’; I’m not yet decided for 2024, but I think it might be ‘momentum’? The other thing I like to do is have at least a vague idea of what I want to achieve or do during the year; one or two big goals, rather than a laundry list of resolutions. I came in to 2023 wanting to sell my flat, move to the South-West (of England) and sell the novel on my Google Drive. Two out of three isn’t bad, and even though I’ve not sold the book, I’m feeling creatively fulfilled, not least thanks to you lovely people here on Substack. Every time I get a pop-up notification telling me some new has signed up for the email, or a few pounds have landed in my ‘Writing income’ account from Substack, it genuinely feels like you are all helping me make this creative dream of mine a reality.