Reflect | 2025

Life this year: writing, reading, community, hormonal surges and giving up alcohol, plus a (brief) look ahead to 2026

My plan was that this post would be a reflection on my writing year in 2025, but it seems to have expanded to also include my reading year (definitely related) and a few broader reflections on life this year (maybe related).

Late December nighttime reflections from the Millennium Bridge in York

Aber Falls / Rhaeadr Fawr in Gwynedd, North Wales. Many internal reflections were had on the walk to and from the waterfall

Writing - Substack

This is the end of my first full calendar year of writing out loud here (I joined Substack in early 2024 and published my first post in August 2024). Once I hit send on this one, I will have published 32 posts on Substack this year, which I’m properly chuffed with. My goal was to publish two posts a month, and I’ve achieved that - plus some irregular additional posts (mostly short pieces of life writing). I wrote a Welcome to Writing Aloud post in the autumn which sets out the who, what and why of my writing here, which I’ve linked below, as well as links to some of my favourite pieces that I published this year.

Compost | October

Ten Years

Reflect | April

This Must Be The Place

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Writing - Memoir First Draft

I set out to complete a first draft of my memoir in 2025, which, with the benefit of hindsight, was a very optimistic goal and one I’m not surprised that I failed to meet. I wrote more about this realisation in October.

I did however write over 65,000 words of a first draft, and I don’t think I would have managed to write so many words without having set myself this goal - so nothing ventured, nothing gained. I am not sure how many of those 65K words will make it in draft 1.5, but I have learned so much about what and how I want to write this year and I don’t regret any of them.

After my big epiphany in the autumn, I’ve taken a break from working on the big memoir project (TM) in November and December. This has given me some much needed distance from the project as it has become increasingly sprawling and I was beginning to feel as if I couldn’t see the woods for the trees. It’s felt good to work on some other, smaller writing projects, while at the same time mulling over ideas for the memoir. I’m excited to get back to writing the never-ending first draft in the new year.

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Writing - Community

Finding and participating in a writing community is one of the biggest highlights of my writing year. This is directly tied to Substack and the many connections with fellow (memoir) writers I have made here. I’ve participated in co-writing sessions and courses, signed up for masterclasses and online workshops, found interesting writers to follow and subscribe to. I am so grateful for the internet and the ability to engage with so much rich material and conversation from my house in rural (ish) County Durham - while there’s a thriving literary scene just up the road in Newcastle, even 20 miles can feel like an impossible distance to travel when you’re writing in fragments of time around your other responsibilities.

Firstly, I want to give a shout out to some of people who have made Substack - and my writing year - such a wonderful place. There are too many to list everyone, but in particular: Clare Skelton-Morris (who I’ve recently discovered a real world connection to via friend we have in common), Sasha Neal (fellow daughter of a yoga teacher mum), Ingrid Fernandez (accountability buddies on the 1000 words of summer challenge), and Kate Anderson, Ivett Gáncs, Jude Jones (they/them), Jaimie Pattison and Miranda R Waterton (all fellow alumni of The Chain). Thank you all for your wonderful writing, your kind comments on my writing, and general chat and interesting discussions, both here and elsewhere. I look forward to connecting with you more in 2026.

In terms of organised and facilitated sessions, my top three are:

The Chain

Lindsay Johnstone’s flash memoir co-creation experiment in which a group of writers respond to a prompt (a short piece of life writing) during a 40 minute writing sprint, with one of those first drafts then being selected as the next link in The Chain and acting as the prompt piece for the following week’s session. Lindsay expertly facilitated a six week run of The Chain last summer, and is running a four week version starting in mid-January (all the details you need are here).

The Chain

Taking part in The Chain was an utter delight and I gained so much confidence from writing and posting messy first draft slices of memoir in a supportive community of fellow writers - as well as learning a lot from the myriad different ways we each approached and responded to the weekly prompts. I was even lucky enough to have one of my pieces selected as the prompt in week 5. If you are writing memoir, or interested in writing memoir, I urge you to sign up for the January-February run - you will not regret it!

Creative Nonfiction: Compelling Memoir course

I wrote about how much I enjoyed Dr Lily Dunn’s online asynchronous course and how valuable I found it in my last post. As with The Chain, one of the best parts of this course was the opportunity to engage with other writers, to read their writing and give and receive constructive feedback. Lily has a wealth of knowledge, skill and experience in writing (and reading) memoir, and was a generous and supportive teacher. She’s running the course again in February-March (all the details can be found here).

This year I have also devoured her latest book, Into Being: the radical craft of memoir and its power to transform, which again I highly recommend you get your hands on if you are interested in memoir - either as a writer or reader. I was lucky enough to get to meet Lily and hear her read from Into Being and discuss memoir writing with Caro Giles at an event in Durham in late October - I only hope I didn’t fangirl too hard!

Sitting in the Dark

Layla O'Mara’s nourishing early morning co-writing sessions. Layla has facilitated multiple spirals of Sitting in the Dark since her first offering in late 2024. They are weekly gatherings on Zoom, held 6-7am on Friday mornings (although the next spiral will take place on Mondays) over 4-8 weeks. Layla begins each session with a short grounding practice, and then we are free to write (or read, or draw, or just sit and think) in the dark for the rest of the hour. It has been such a nourishing experience to take part in these sessions, and again the community element is key: the feeling of sharing a space and time with other writers and creators, particularly in those liminal early morning hours. Although my teen did report to his dad that “Mum’s doing something witchy again” after finding me sitting in the dark with candles just before the Solstice! The next spiral starts on 26 January (more info here) and I’m looking forward to joining in for some, and hopefully all of the sessions. It is no exaggeration to say that these sessions have changed my relationship with the dark.

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Reading

I set out to read more books in 2025 than I did in 2024, and I did. I’ve read 22 books this year (if you count the two that I’m currently in the process of reading). This might not sound like a lot, but it feels like a big achievement in the aftermath of the pandemic and its rolling lockdowns, which seemed to decimate my attention span and ability to read for pleasure (Katherine May had a similar experience, which she writes about in Enchantment and this Guardian article).

This year I tried to prioritise reading, aiming to read 1-2 books each month. Looking back at the list of books I read this year I can see that the vast majority were written by women. I only read two books written by men: a re-read of The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell, and The Day That Went Missing by Richard Beard, which is one of the best memoirs I have ever read. Three books I read this year were re-reads (The Siege of Krishnapur, The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater, A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel) and two of these I read as part of Simon Haisell’s slow reads on Footnotes and Tangents (hint: not The Scorpio Races, which is a rollicking YA novel about flesh eating fairy horses, family, home and young love). I really recommend joining a slow read-along in 2026 if, like me, you are struggling to find the time and headspace to read - it’s a sustainable pace and also a lot of fun to read in community with others, as well as all the fascinating historical rabbit holes Simon explores. He has some great books lined up for a slow read in 2026 (see more below), but there are many other slow reads being hosted on Substack.

I have, unsurprisingly, read a lot of memoir this year (12 books, if I include three that are at least memoir-adjacent: A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, All Fours by Miranda July, and Weathering by Ruth Allen). It feels essential to read memoirs given I am currently trying to write one, and it’s been a fascinating experience to bring my academic, analytical reading hat to these books and read them not only for the story but to understand the craft and mechanics of how the story is being told. Although I do occasionally need to detour into some fiction reading to recover after the voice of my inner critic gets too loud and I start to wonder why I’m even trying to write memoir when these authors are doing it so much better than I ever could). Lily Dunn’s excellent Into Being has been really valuable in helping me to polish my critical reading skills, as well helping to quiet my inner critic via the writing exercises she has included at the end of each chapter, which offer a guided opportunity to put some of the craft skills she writes about into practice.

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Word for 2025

In the past I have sometimes selected a word for the year in early January, as an intention or an attempt at manifesting how I want the year ahead to feel or the version of myself I hope to become. It’s had mixed results - mostly my chosen word has slipped my mind by the end of February until I rediscover it in late December. Sometimes I’ve been surprised at the ways my forgotten word of the year has showed up for me - or the ways I’ve showed up for the word - over the year. More often I find myself chuckling fondly at how hopeful and idealistic January Ellen was.

This year I’m taking inspiration from Sue Reed’s latest post and picking a word to sum up the year that’s gone.

The first word that came to mind was “hormones”. Both me and my eldest son are currently surfing increasingly turbulent hormonal waves: he’s plunging into adolescence while I’m splashing about in the shallows of perimenopause (I wrote about this experience in the piece I had published in motherlore magazine issue 4). 2025 has definitely been a year of educating myself on the process, symptoms and experiences of perimenopause, ably supported by Lindsay Johnstone’s writing on this topic. I also really appreciated Kate Anderson’s recent post, especially the link to information on histamine production and perimenopause, which has possibly shed some light on some of my own health issues this year.

But “hormones” felt too clinical as a word for the year, so after some reflection I finally picked S U R G E. It covers the hormones that have so characterised this year for me, and there’s also a pleasing hint of the sea. One key thing you should know about me is that I love the sea, and given the chance will wax lyrical about how much more like myself and how much more calm I feel when I am by the sea. I grew up by the sea and dream of one day living on the coast again. So surge (hormonal, tidal) feels like a good fit. I’ve also experienced a surge in my writing this year - going from the tentative beginnings of late 2024 when I finally decided to commit to giving this writing thing a go after day dreaming about it for years, to December 2025 with a (mostly) daily writing habit, publishing regularly on Substack, 65K+ words of a first draft written, and having had two pieces of my writing published. When I type it all out like that, I realise it’s not surprising that I’ve been feeling a little burnt out since the autumn, having gone from 0-60mph (or faster?) in a relatively short space of time.

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Dry 2025

Another word for the year could have been D R Y. In 2025 I surprised myself by cutting out alcohol almost entirely. I did Dry January and at the end of that month I wasn’t missing alcohol at all, so I decided to keep going until the time came that I fancied a drink. I didn’t have any particular timeframe in mind and fully expected to be back to “normal” by the summer at the latest, the lure of a cold, refreshing cider on a hot day likely to prove too tempting. But it didn’t happen. I kept not missing alcohol so I kept not drinking it, and now here we are a year later.

I have had a few drinks over the past 12 months: a cocktail on a date night, a glass of wine at a birthday meal, a few mugs of mulled wine over the Christmas period. So all the alcoholic drinks I’ve had this year have been tied to special occasions. I was surprised to find that I could enjoy a single drink while out at a restaurant without slipping off the wagon and returning to old habits of alcohol as a way of marking the weekends and rewarding myself for getting through another week of work and parenting.

I should caveat all of the above by saying that - outside of my late teens and early 20s - I have never really been a big drinker. However I have always had a complicated relationship with alcohol linked to the alcoholism of a close family member. I’ve spent a lot of time ever since I was a child worrying that I might or could become an alcoholic - but stopping drinking has allowed me to put those worries to one side. The worries aren’t gone exactly, but I’m more able to ignore them because I’m not drinking.

Finally, I feel pretty confident in drawing a direct connection between stopping drinking and my current early morning writing habit. I’m not sure I’d have been able to regularly get up at 6am to write for a precious hour before the rest of the house is awake if I had also been drinking every weekend.

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2026

This is becoming an epically long post (I should probably award ceritficates of achievement for anyone who has made it this far), but I want to end by (briefly) looking ahead at the year to come. I think I can probably sum up my writing (and reading) goals as more learning, more connection, more playing, more experimenting.

Writing

I’m planning to return to working on my big memoir project (TM) in January 2026, and renewing my 2025 goal to complete a first draft by the end of the year. This may or may not involve shelving some/most/all of the 65K+ words I wrote this year and starting again. Probably not all of them, but it does feel like I want to frame and approach the narrative in a very different way to how it is currently set up. We shall see.

I want to keep submitting writing to publications, competitions and fellowships, but I need to think about energy and balance. Writing for submission takes my attention away from the memoir first draft and requires a lot of energy - often writing, redrafting and polishing a new piece of writing in a relatively short space of time. I want to think carefully about what is realistic and achievable without tipping me in the direction of burnout or overwhelm, things that I felt quite close to towards the end of this year. I want to be more selective about what and where I submit.

I will continue posting every two weeks here, although I keep wondering about whether to experiment with shorter, weekly posts. I’m considering whether to create a new post series to replace this year’s Compost posts (see my last post for more on this) or whether to take a more pick and mix approach, writing about what’s on my mind in a given week/fortnight/month. I’m planning to continue my monthly Reflect posts, because I find them both interesting and useful - they help to keep me accountable and it’s been fascinating to read back through them all this month and see how my writing process has developed.

Reading

As I believe is traditional, the books in my to read list would resemble an unstable Leaning Tower of Pisa if I stacked them all up. An unexpected bonus of my resolution this year to read more books is that it’s given me a baseline for how many books I can realistically hope to read in a year. In 2025 I read 22 books - in 2026 I’m aiming to read 24 books.

Yesterday I went through the books on my to read list that I already own, or have borrowed from the library or my dad, and picked out 20 of them: 10 fiction and 10 non-fiction (mostly memoir). My goal is not to buy any new books until I’ve read all 20 of these books. But it also leaves me with 4 free spaces from my overall target of 24 books in anticipation of the inevitable moment when I am distracted by a shiny new hardback on offer in the bookshop, or make a happy discovery of a book from my to read list while browsing the library shelves.

Fiction reading plans for 2026 - including quite a lot of historical fiction

My fiction pile includes three books from Simon Haisell’s 2026 Slow Read picks: Regeneration (Pat Barker), Treacle Walker (Alan Garner), and The Children’s Book (AS Byatt). These are all re-reads for me, so I’m looking forward to enjoying them in a new way and diving deeper into the ideas and history in these books, or the ideas they spark in me.

Non-fiction reading plans for 2026 - almost entirely memoir

My non-fiction pile is largely shaped by my ongoing memoir project and includes a number of books that are effectively research: people writing about topics adjacent to what I want to write about (for example Milk by Alice Kinsella, Expecting by Chitra Ramaswamy, and Mother Animal by Helen Jukes). I’m looking forward to reading these books both for their content but also with a critical eye, focusing on what I can learn from the choices the authors have made in terms of structure, voice and tone.