Hey Substackers, happy February. We made it through the longest month. Now get ready for the rest of the year to fly.

I love January, as a rule. A new year doesn’t really bring change, the calendar being a human construct blah blah blah, but there’s something comforting about the turning of a page, the scrubbing of the slate, the turning of one’s face to the new. I’m a contradiction in many ways, one of which is that I’m a nostalgic who loves a new adventure and sees the blankness of the future as exciting and free. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? We can’t avoid it so we may as well jump in.

I always link January with a new creative project. This is because I started writing my debut novel Another Life in the first week of January 2019. I had done a couple of years of planning in my head, so by the time my fingers met the keyboard, I was desperate to start (this is v important for long-form writing, I think - wait, wait, wait…GO). I wrote a thousand words a day for three months and by the end of March, I had a novel. I achieved something I never thought I would: the completion of a creative project. My past is filled with half-baked projects and hobbies.

What can I say? Like Don Draper, I love the beginnings of things.

But Another Life consumed me. It was the right book for the right time, in that it allowed me to purge my brain of true feelings through a fake lens, just when I was going through the hardest time of my life. I needed a distraction, and writing a novel proved a glorious distraction. I felt more alive during those writing days in early 2019 than I had felt in years. I wasn’t deadening parts of myself anymore, but shining a torch on their crevices. I was feeling, in all the best, euphoric ways.

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And so January is precious to me. It also begins with my eldest son’s birthday, which is fitting with my linking of the month with a new creative project. I literally did this. Motherhood began for me in a January. My life as a writer began on the same page of the calendar a few years on. The universe is clearly telling me that it’s the month for me.

This January I completed my copy edits for book three. Now this baby is done and dusted, heading off into the cogs and wheels of the publishing machine. I hope to bring more news soon, but suffice to say that it’s pencilled in for spring 2026. I plan to release the first chapter of the book here for my paid subscribers as a way of saying thank you for your support and for my haphazard posting… The truth is that I’m always writing, even if it’s not directly here on these pages, and your support of that does not go unnoticed.

I hope you have a creative project of your own on the go. Whether it’s writing or painting or meditating or doing nothing but staring at the ceiling in deep thought, the older I get the more convinced I am that it’s the path to happiness. Dabbling, playing, not even necessarily having a finish line in sight… That’s the only way to truly live.