Reflect | December
My writing life this month: the melancholy of the festive season, experimenting with blending memoir and fiction, honing my craft skills, and what an unsuccessful submission might teach me
The 12th instalment of my monthly Reflect posts: a check in with my writing goals for the month that’s ending, where I’m at with the first draft of the memoir that I set out to complete in 2025 (maybe by the end of 2026 instead?), and any interesting ideas emerging from what I’ve been writing about.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how Christmas has changed for me over the years. The magic and excitement of Christmas as a child, my anticipation ramping up and up with each new window I opened on the advent calendar. Then the slow dawning realisation, somewhere around 10 years old, that maybe there was something else going on, because Father Christmas had brought me a stocking full of small, fun gifts (bath pearls, a new pen, a novelty rubber, a soft woollen scarf) but he’d brought my friend a new bike or a Barbie Dream House, and I couldn’t believe the big man would be deliberately unfair. Adulthood, when the magic began to fade a little and Christmas started to feel a bit like any other day - a special day, gilded with traditions and carol music, and for many years even a stocking from my parents - but a day that would come, and then pass. The new kind of magic I discovered the year my eldest son was born, feeling a deeper understanding of the everyday miracle of a baby’s birth.
Then there’s the next level of adulthood that was unlocked when, instead of each of us returning to our separate childhood homes until the new year, I spent Christmas together with my now husband, first at my parents’ house and then the following year with his mum. The discovery of all the ways his family did Christmas wrong differently, from when they opened presents and what time they sat down to Christmas dinner, to the food was served and the music on the stereo. Or watching him try to hide a grimace as he grappled with the unsettling ways my family did Christmas wrong differently from his own. Now the two of us are a decade into creating our own family Christmas traditions, some adopted from my childhood, some from his, some that are all our own. We’ve been the magic makers for at least ten years, vicariously reliving the magic of Christmas in childhood through our sons, the big day a strange mix of delight and exhaustion.
New Year’s Eve too has assumed many different forms over the years. As a child, I mostly found it odd and unsettling that somehow, while I was sleeping, one year would end and a new one would start. Then in my later teens and young adulthood it became a big night out, a chance to meet up with friends from school and sixth form who I might not have seen since the summer. A big group of us holing up in a chosen pub, live music from a local cover band, buying ever expanding rounds of drinks, the mini dramas that could play out over the final hours of the year - who had snogged who, couples falling out, flirting and teasing and drunken dancing.
I’ve always been a bit of a Scrooge about New Year’s Eve, resenting the social pressure to have an amazing night and stories to tell the following day. How nonsensical it can feel to be venturing out into the cold and dark (and in North Wales, often the driving rain) of a December night, rather than hunkering down in front of a fire with a plate of leftovers and an open box of chocolates. I felt a sense of relief when early parenthood made a night out almost impossible: finally, I had a good reason to stay in and watch a film, warm and dry and drama free (if I didn’t count the occasional explosive nappy situation), complaining about what was on Jools Holland, sipping fizz at midnight and then going straight to bed.
After my mum died, New Year’s - and increasingly Christmas too - always feels a little melancholy. I ruminate on loss and endings, saying goodbye to a year that will never come again, a person that will never come again. I want to be quiet and still, to go to ground for a little while, read books, go for slow walks and let time settle within me as the year turns. It’s always a tricky balance, trying to find moments of the stillness that I crave amongst the chaos of December - panicked present buying, navigating the whirl of Christmas events at the primary school, negotiating visits to different far-flung family members, remembering to move the bloody elf every night, my children’s ever increasing excitement levels - and I often end up resenting the season a little.
One moment of stillness I want to make time for is this penultimate post of the year. The final and twelfth instalment of my Reflect series. This month I’m planning a double reflection: looking back at both December and at 2025 as a whole. This post will be my usual reflection on my writing month, with the second instalment - reflecting on my writing year - to follow on New Year’s Eve.
Final posts in my Compost and Reflect series
I’ve completed both of the monthly series that I set out to write and publish in 2025: Compost and Reflect. It feels good to have done so - one the main reasons I decided to start writing on Substack was for the accountability. If I say that I will publish two essays a month, then I need to follow through on that. Substack has helped me to start and continue to write on a regular basis - often daily but at least two or three times a week. I’ve enjoyed the process of writing both series, particularly these Reflect posts where I look back on my writing life each month and reflect on the process of setting out to write a memoir. The Compost posts have been - by design - more of a mixed bag. The challenge of writing a short piece on my chosen bird and tarot card of the month has been fun, and sometimes I’ve discovered unexpected connections between these and the short pieces of nature or life writing that have made up the other half of the Compost posts.
Substack writing plans for 2026
This one is a work in progress, and something I’m looking forward to playing around with over the Christmas break and into the New Year (this year, school and work don’t restart until 5 January, which feels very luxurious). I’m considering possible new post series, and planning to continue my end of the month Reflect posts, as well as writing the final instalment in my mini-series on all the houses I’ve ever lived in.
I have no plans to turn on paid subscriptions - too many worries about how this would change the way I write here and make it feel too much like an obligation, something I might come to resent in the same way as I sometimes feel about my day job. It also still feels like one of the main audiences I’m writing for here is myself. I write, and publish my writing, partly to continue to prove to myself that I can do it, that I can describe myself as a writer without feeling like a fake or an imposter. Of course, I’m also writing here to connect with other people - and I’ve connected with so many lovely readers and fellow writers this year (more on that in my Reflect 2025 post on the 31st!) - so I want to take some time to investigate which of my posts this year have landed with my audience and see whether that might help to shape what I plan to write about here in 2026.
Writing from the Archives
I had an excellent one-to-one session with Lindsay Johnstone earlier this month, which fired me up with renewed enthusiasm and lots of ideas for when I return to writing the first draft of my memoir in the new year. I’m also very excited about the current writing task in the Writing from the Archives group programme Lindsay is running at the moment - another thing that I’m looking forward to diving into over the Christmas break. I’ve been busy searching and transcribing newspaper articles and census records from the 1800s, and plotting out a piece that seems likely to be a strange mix of memoir and fiction, writing about a distant ancestor who was executed for murder in the 1860s.
I’ve gone full maverick TV detective with a virtual pinboard and different coloured threads connecting photographs of the victim, suspect, murder weapon and witnesses. I’m not far off attempting to map out a floor plan of Dover Priory Station as it was a hundred and sixty years ago. Many wild theories about the motivation behind the crime have been considered and discarded - some of them straight out of the plot of a soap opera or a Dickens novel - as well as lots of reflection on why I seem to feel the need to “prove” that my ancestor wasn’t (or wasn’t just) a cold blooded murderer. I’ve finally settled on a narrative that feels like it could - almost - be true, so I feel ready to start writing this story.
Final assignment for Dr Lily Dunn’s Creative Nonfiction: Compelling Memoir course
Completed! I’ve really enjoyed Lily’s course, which has similarly fired me up and given me lots of new ideas for how to approach and frame the narrative of my memoir in progress. It’s a much needed injection of craft skills and techniques into my writing process, which to date has largely been a more instinctive process of sitting down at my desk each day and seeing what comes out. Both are important - the unvarnished spill of memories and emotions to excavate the bones of the story I want to tell, but then the slow, painstaking process of polishing these memories, deciding how to connect them together, what angle I want the reader to look at them from.
The fortnightly assignments I wrote during the course have delved more into childhood memories than I expected. This felt like both a much-needed break from the narrative of my memoir, which was beginning to feel a little claustrophobic - but also revealed some surprising synchronicities and echoes between my childhood experiences and some of the themes I want to write about in the memoir. Lily is an excellent teacher and created a supportive online space for the group to share our writing , provide constructive feedback to each other and discuss the writing process. I highly recommend this course if you’re in the early to middle stages of writing a memoir and are looking to get some peer feedback on your writing . It’s running again in February - March 2026 (click here for more information).
Submit to Folding Rock
This felt increasingly like a stretch goal as the days ticked down towards the 15 December deadline for submission, but I managed it. I wasn’t completely happy with my piece but ran out of time for further edits and polishing, so I took the plunge and pressed submit. Like some of my other writing intentions above, the piece I wrote took me in slightly unexpected directions. I thought it was going to be a standalone essay, separate from the larger memoir project, but I found so many threads of new themes that I could weave into the larger writing project. I’m excited to explore these further, particularly the blend of memoir with fictional elements (auto fiction?) that seems to be emerging.
Unfortunately, my essay wasn’t selected for publication, but I received an encouraging email from the nonfiction editor Kathryn Tann (who writes here at Dwell) to say that it was one of the final shortlisted pieces and encouraging me to submit to them again. I’m trying to sit with the disappointment for a little while - the piece felt good, or like it had the potential to be good - before I return to it next year to work on it further, looking for other places I could submit it to, or ways I could incorporate elements of it into the memoir-in-progress.
Loved this Reflect post, Ellen, as I have all of them - but even more to celebrate and think about as the year draws to a close. So excited to hear more about the archive/fiction piece under development, it sounds really fascinating - and hope you’ve managed to find some stillness, fresh air and quiet (is any of that possible?!) in amongst all the madness. One major thing to celebrate: the bloody elf can go back in a box for another eleven months!