January 2025

(Not quite) right back to it

Author plans, god laughs

How’s your 2025 so far? I had big plans for writing this month, but getting back into it has been much slower than I hoped. I had written down the wrong start date for my kid’s first day of preschool, and we rocked up two weeks ago, all excited with a perfectly packed lunchbox, to find the doors locked. Yeah, her real first day is next week. Our apartment has been infested with cockroaches, our heads with nits (a recurring gift from daycare). And then yesterday we woke up at 5am to find the hot water system had burst and half our flat was an inch deep in water. I think you can guess whether I hit my goal of finishing the novel draft, haha.

This Sunday I’m doing a 2km ocean swim. It seemed reasonable when I registered last October, but now I’m feeling quite unprepared! But I’ll be tootling along at the back of the pack with the SUCKERS, finishing at whatever pace is required to get there. Things take as long as they take.

I nearly didn’t send this but wanted to share a few things I’ve loved this month; please forgive the lack of prettiness and inevitable typos!

Cheers,

Clare x

Events

Some fun events coming up fast:

• Sydney: Dymocks Books In Bars - Rom Com Queens: February 11 (with Saman Shad, Karina May, Penelope Janu and Amy Hutton). Tickets $30 including a drink and shared platters

• Goulburn: Library Lovers Day in conversation with Karina May: February 14 at Goulburn Mulwaree Library. Tickets $5

• Port Macquarie: Rom Com Celebration author panel with Karina May and Melanie Saward: March 8 at Port Macquarie Library. Book here (free)

ICYMI

I had such a ball chatting with Emily Herbert (check out her beautifully written newsletter While he sleeps) about writing and summer reading for Graziher magazine’s Life on the Land podcast. Have a listen!

Writing

Still finishing that manuscript draft… If I have one writing tip this month it’s the power of a blank document. I draft in Scrivener and all my unfinished chapters are a dumping ground of fragments and notes. I was finding it overwhelming trying to weave them into scenes that made sense — starting a clean new doc, first with bullet points for the sequence of events, then fleshed out with action and dialogue (pasting in any fragments where they fit), has helped me get past the overwhelm.

In other writing, I’ve rounded up some of my most anticipated books of the coming months:

That Rom Com Pod

Our 2024-25 Summer Reading Special went live in early January. We’re taking a little break while Karina’s busy launching That Island Feeling, but we’ll be back before you know it.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, follow on Instagram, or sign up on Substack to recieve an email newsletter when each new episode drops, including links to all the books, movies and articles we discuss.

Reading

Got through lots of wonderful books this month, including Emily Usher’s breathtaking debut Wild Ground. A working-class Romeo and Juliet story set in Yorkshire, I sobbed as I finished it, blown away by the beauty Emily and her characters were able to wring from the bleakness of their circumstances. Emily was in my class for Year of the Novel and it was fascinating to see this book in its final form after reading an early draft.

In 2025 I’m reading more backlist books; this month: a slim and exquisite novel in verse, Autobiography of Red (1998) by Anne Carson (thanks Danielle!) and Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours (1998). The Hours is set over 24 hours and I think it took me that long to read it, swept up in the gorgeous prose and the stories of three women including Virginia Woolf, with a stunning ending. Now I’m keen to get my hands on Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, a big inspiration for Cunningham’s novel.

In shorter form, I enjoyed this piece sparked by former US President Jimmy Carter’s passing. (‘"We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours" Or: the most beautiful writing advice ever to drift through interstellar space.’) How to Glow in the Dark is a dishy substack from the agents at US agency Neon Literary. The content is generally paywalled but you’ll almost always strike some gold. In this case I fell down a rabbit hole learning about The Golden Records,Ann Druyal and Carl Sagan - I’m sure someone has written a novel inspired by these two but I can’t find it for the life of me. Do you know?

And did you see Claire Christian is going to be writing a romance novella in collaboration with the paid subscribers to her substack, PEARLER? I can’t wait to see this unfold.

Another indie bites the dust

Disappointing news last week that Text Publishing was acquired by Penguin Random House, the third independent publisher to fold into a major publishing house in recent times (after Simon & Schuster acquired Affirm Press, and Pantera Press was absorbed by Hardie Grant). Just like any industry, it’s concerning when big international conglomerates, answerable to shareholders, wield all the power and influence and muscle out smaller operators.

Alice Grundy wrote about the trend for The Conversation, looking at why times have been so tight for indies and what the publishing landscape risks losing without small players (ie diverse voices, literary experimentation, even the canon of Australian classics resurfaced as Text Classics). Text in particular played a huge role in supporting Australian YA authors, including through the Text Prize, which they also announced this month would be discontinued. This is the prize that surfaced talents like Nina Kenwood, Claire Christian and Alice Boyle.

Please take this as a reminder to, wherever you can, support local independent booksellers and publishers with your purchasing power. Personally I save big international titles for library requests and my free audiobooks on Spotify, so that my budget for new books goes where it can have the most impact (but I do recognise my great luck in being sent many new books). And here’s your regular reminder that Australian authors do receive payment when you borrow their books through libraries.

Listening

This new song from Mallrat (via Soph Benjamin’s substack) is gorgeous:

You can read a bit of background on the video here, it’s filmed around Rosewood, west of Brisbane. We were stuck there briefly once when Mum and Dad’s car broke down, so I feel like I have a small claim on the place!

The Guardian’s Full Story podcast summer series has been fun, especially this episode with Zoe Foster Blake on how to write a book. Interviewer Bridie Jabour poses a great curly question about parenting. In our childhoods we developed storytelling and imaginative worlds by just being really bloody bored sometimes, but that’s not something our kids experience much these days. It’s a lot to think about…

I started following Caro Claire Burke on instagram when the trade news broke about her debut novel Yesteryear being snapped up in a huge way, including Anne Hathaway buying the rights to produce and star in an adaptation. It is a great concept, about a tradwife influencer who wakes up one day finding herself seemingly in the past. Burke’s podcast with Katie Gatti Tassin, Diabolical Lies, is long and meandering, but dense with something I really enjoy: critical/deep thinking about supposedly shallow things. This episode, ostensibly about whether Taylor Swift has used fillers and what it means if she has, becomes a big, circling conversation about ageing, fame, feminism, and our culture’s acceptance of cosmetic procedures—for certain people. It also taught me something I didn’t know about how fillers work, the effect of which leads one host to declare filler is ‘the heroin of cosmetic procedures’. DARK.