Finishing strong, or perhaps finishing softly...

Every month I think that I should be putting the writing updates upfront, and every month I leave them until last. Not this month!

• I was thrilled to be invited to be the featured author for the Reading by Candlelight historical fiction book box for December, and even more thrilled to see on their Instagram page that the boxes have completely sold out. I was also interviewed by Fiona Taylor from the accompanying podcast, the Reading by Candlelight Book Club. You can listen here.

• In January/ February, The Distance Between Dreams will also be the featured read-a-long for the Book Club for Change. I am so excited to be chatting to Sally from Chapters for Change live on Instagram on Monday the 16th of February. Check out their Instagram for more details.

• Excitingly, I am extremely close to having finished the latest revision of my next novel manuscript, titled The Good Daughter. I hope to have it finished by the end of 2025 and be sending it out in 2026 (and I also hope that by putting this in this update, you’ll all hold me to it.)

• You can find more upcoming events and news on my website, when I get around to updating it in January…

The AU Review team did a wrap up of their best books of the year here but I was only allowed to put forward a couple of books so I’ve made a more extensive list for you. This list is the reason the newsletter is a bit early this month too, because I thought anyone doing last minute book shopping might like some recommendations…

In no particular order:

• By Her Hand by Marion Taffe

• The Butterfly Women by Madeleine Cleary

• What the River Knows by Isabel Ibanez

• Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley

• The Wedding People by Alison Espach

• The Cicada House by Ella Ward

• Everyone in my Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson (plus there are sequels)

• The Paradise Heights Craft Store Stitch Up by Kate Solly

• The Booklover’s Library by Madeline Martin

• The Rom-Commers by Katherine Center (The Love Haters was also good)

• Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

• Silverborn by Jessica Townsend (worth the wait)

• Daughters of Batavia by Stefanie Koens

• Human Rites by Juno Dawson (again, worth the wait)

• The Underworld by Sofie Laguna

I’m reading The Heir Apparent by Rebecca Armitage right now and it may just sneak on as book number 16, who knows.

(Just as a side note on the subject of Best Books lists, because I know that they can sometimes feel like a kick in the teeth to writers who aren’t on them… reading is such a personal thing, and a reader’s reaction to a book is often grounded in the time and place of reading, and what else is going on in their lives. There are also THOUSANDS of books published each year and the people who make these lists definitely don’t read them all. If you’re not on a list, it’s not because you don’t deserve to be. It might just be, for example, because after moving 16 covers onto a pink background, you felt like you’d had enough of being on Canva and wanted to go read. Your worth as an author is defined by so much more than best books lists, and remember, you wrote a book, which is totally badass in itself to begin with. This is a note to myself as much as it is to anyone else.)

Let’s talk about reading, shall we?

There are many theories about how easy or even possible it is for a person to change. That you have to keep at something for twelve weeks before something becomes an automatic part of your routine. That you’ll only be able to change if it’s something you really want to do, deep down. That people aren’t even capable of change, that we are who we are and leopards don’t change their spots. But if all that is true, then tell me why it is that so much time and research has been invested into studying our changing habits - why is it that so many people I have spoken to lately have said something along the lines of “I used to read so much more but now I can’t stop picking up my phone instead?”

Change is inevitable, but controlling how things change is difficult. (Also scary. I really hate change that I haven’t decided on myself.)

Most of us know this, I think. Yet every year, New Year’s rolls around and many of us start thinking about resolutions. What do we want to take with us into the new year? What would we like to achieve? What will success look like for us? Who do we want to be?

As for me, I always start thinking about resolutions and goals in about October. I might have mentioned this before when I introduced the Project Backlist concept. The version of me who makes the list of goals and intentions in time for January 1 is someone else entirely from the version who, somewhere around ten months in, looks back at the list and realises some of the things were never going to happen.

I choose to think of it as a fun way of measuring my own evolution as a person, rather than any indicator of success or failure — although it’s highly likely that not reaching some of the goals the ambitious, January version of me laid out will be one of the reasons I feel disappointed with myself the following December 31.

But what does this have to do with reading?

In 2026, I want to be more intentional about how I spend my time. To borrow a concept that I heard Madeleine Cleary (author of The Butterfly Women, one of my top reads of the year) talk about on The Book Deal Podcast, I want to 'romanticise’ my life - use the fancy mugs, drink the good coffee, enjoy my cup of tea without feeling like I have to also be doing ten other things while I drink it. I don’t want to get to the end of a weekend, and when asked the question about how I spent it, only be able to say I did not much, meaning I watched way too many hours of (admittedly hilarious) instagram reels of people blissfully closing their eyes and splicing their videos with that clip of Jon Hamm in a night club. There is only so many times you can see the same meme…

When I say that I did not much on my weekends, I want to mean that I took a book and my picnic rug to a park and sat under a shady tree reading and eating cheese. I want to be able to answer by saying that I spent my weekend researching obscure documents for my novel or my family history project. I want to not miss out on seeing movies that interest me anymore, and get over the idea that you need to have company in order to sit through a film that you can’t talk during anyway. I think perhaps the key to being about to do all of this might be about boundaries — about taking steps to ensure I have the bandwidth left by the weekend to be able to relax, rather than simply exist and engage passively with the internet.

If that all sounds rather bleak and frustrated, I hope that this month’s TBR update will be a little more hopeful. While I still have a ridiculously high TBR number (no, I won’t tell you what it is), I have been managing to get more reading in lately. This includes reading a book that skyrocketed into my top reads of the year automatically - The Underworld by Sofie Laguna. I am not sure what it was about this book exactly that captured my heart in such a way, but I loved it. I loved Martha and the way that Laguna was able to make us feel sorry for her but also love her and want to be friends with her at the same time. The evocation of someone with low self esteem is so difficult to get right without tipping over the line and making their point of view unbearable.

I’ve also read two books by Terry Pratchett this month. Pratchett became my comfort reading over the past couple of years - his Discworld books seem to work on many levels which is perfect for wanting either some really quite deep philosophical insights into the world (most of the humour comes from pointing out the ridiculousness of things that really exist) or just a bit of frivolity and humour. I’ve now finished the main set of ‘Witches’ novels starring the inestimable Granny Weatherwax, having just finished Carpe Jugulum, and earlier in the month I dipped in to one of the novels about Pratchett’s Death character, skipping to the Christmassy novel Hogfather. I appreciate very much that it’s possible to read each book as a standalone, and while there are nuggets for fans who have read all the books in order to find, I never feel disoriented if I pickup at a random place in the series, as each book stands alone.

Here’s an update on the ten before the end list:

• Summer, in Between by Holly Cardamone

• Gunpowder Creek by Alex Dook

• The Farm by Jessica Mansour-Nahra

• Stillwater by Tanya Scott

• The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman

• The Underworld by Sofie Laguna

• Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

• The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons (I switched to audio on this one and it’s weirding me out a bit… should I continue??)

• The Lucky Sisters by Rachael Johns

• Nightingale by Laura Elvery

More than halfway through, which I think is pretty good for someone who is terrible at reading to a prescribed TBR!

I’ve also finished 100 books this year according to The Storygraph tracker that I set up, which I am pretty pleased with.

This brings me to…

The reason for my ridiculously high TBR number is because my book buying has far outpaced my book reading in 2025. I have become a little addicted to second hand books, my writers group regularly meets near one of my favourite bookshops, I connected with lots of wonderful debut writers through the Debut Crew 2025 discord server, and it all culminated in me being really overwhelmed and surrounded by (I kid you not) overflowing shelves, two boxes, a crate and a washing basket full of books. It has to end!

Reading and collecting books should be fun, not panic attack inducing.

So in 2026, I have created a game. I have allocated myself a number of tokens (beans - they’re actually river stones from Bunnings but they look cool in a jar) for book purchases which is equal to half the number of books I have read so far in 2025 — meaning the more I read before the end of this year, the stronger a position I start from. Each time I buy a book in 2026 I spend a token. If I spend them all way too early in the year, that’s it. Too bad. There are ways to earn more tokens - such as reading books from Project Backlist, submitting a review that’s owing, or finishing a book over 500 pages.

Am I worried that I won’t stick to it? Absolutely.

Does that actually matter? No, probably not. For now, I am giving it a try.

Another goal from 2025 that I can mark off as ‘done’ is my quest to get rid of 100 things that I was not using around the house. Hooray!

But do things feel any less cluttered? Not really. So in 2026, another thing I will be focussing on is noticing what I actually use, and using up things that I have backlogs of. I have set myself up a ‘no buy list’ of categories of things that I have lots of. Things like:

• Notebooks and pens

• Tea

• Socks and stockings (seriously, how does one person end up with so many socks?)

• Earrings

• Lipstick

• Handcream

In 2026, if I can happily say I have used up all of one of those categories of things, I will be happy indeed. (It probably won’t be the socks but you never know.)

There will also be a list of categories that I’ll work up of things that I will need to stop and really consider if there’s a genuine need before buying. I do not need any new clothes, for example, but I’m also trying to romanticise my life, remember? Sometimes that might involve a whimsical outfit…

I’ll keep on with the lessons I have learned on my decluttering spree this year but I won’t be actively counting what I get rid of or how anymore. If you have decluttering tips or suggestions, feel free to leave those in a comment.

Wishing you all a very happy end to the year.

I hope that some of your gifts are book shaped.