2025: The Year of Optimism. Let's Dream!

Firstly, welcome to all the new subscribers who’ve joined us over the past couple of weeks while I’ve been relaxing and recharging in my beach house on Western Australia’s south-west coast. It’s great to have you here, in what I think is the loveliest place on the internet, where we talk about books and writing and extraordinary women, with a little sprinkle of France and fashion and other fabulous things thrown in for good measure.

This is my regular monthly post for all subscribers, where I basically go behind the scenes of both my writing life and my mind and share with you what I’ve been working on over the past month, as well as what I’ve been thinking about. And it’s where you get all the updates on events I’m appearing at and what you can look forward to in the months ahead. So let’s dive in!

I Chose a Word This Year

I’ve never been a person who chooses a word at the start of the year as a focus or touchstone for the coming twelve months. I’ve set goals and resolutions in the past, and also had years where I’ve been resolution-free and goal-less. Last year I had a whole sentence as my inspiration but this year, I’ve decided, for the first time, to edit myself down to one word. The very next minute I heard a little voice in my head say, but won’t it be hard to choose just one? (I’m notorious for handing in books to my editor that are about 10,000 words longer than they need to be!) The pressure of getting it right!

But then a word jumped into my mind and I knew immediately that it was the one.

Optimism.

Let me explain.

As an author, it’s so easy to feel pessimistic. Lately, everyone knows an author who’s been dropped by their publisher, or whose submission didn’t get picked up, or who’s taken on a full-time job because they just aren’t making any money out of writing. The book market is very different now than it was three or four years ago (but isn’t it always?) and there are countless articles in the media letting you know that without a viral TikTok video, you might as well toss your words into a trash can as set them down on paper. People are buying brands rather than stories. TikTok rules. Romantasy rules. Rural crime rules. Perhaps even rom com vampire Westerns rule. Whereas what you’re sitting down to write, it can sometimes seem, isn’t what rules.

I was thinking about this recently because, in a group of writers I belong to, one of us had made the suggestion that we all share our goals for 2025, no matter how big or small. It was such a great idea, but it was interesting how many of us—including me—said that we were scared or embarrassed to set down on paper in front of a group of people our deepest dreams for the year ahead.

When did we all become so afraid?

If we stop dreaming, then how will we be able to appreciate stories, which are, after all, vivid, lengthy dreams? If we stop dreaming, how will seemingly impossible ideas ever be made possible? Where will the next Marie Curie come from? Or the next Margaret Atwood? The next Marie-Madeleine Fourcade?

Dreaming is fundamental to the life of being a fiction writer, to creating worlds and characters and stories, but dreams aren't only important in a fictional context. They’re important in our lives because they make us reach out beyond the confines of what we perceive to be the limits of our world; they make us dip our toe into the waters of the unexplored.

To some people, my list of dreams or goals might seem grandiose or foolish, too ambitious. Some people might wonder why I can't be happy with what I have right now. I’m very happy with what I have right now. But you can be happy with what you have and still have dreams.

Perhaps the fear of saying aloud what our dreams are is because we’re worried about people laughing at us behind out backs if we don't achieve those dreams. But the kind of people who’d laugh at you for not achieving a dream you were bold enough to imagine the first place aren’t the kind of people we should care about anyway. Why be embarrassed about having the imagination to conjure up something that’s wild and exciting and extraordinary simply because it doesn't happen within a specified timeframe? It might happen next year or the year after or the year after that. Maybe it might never happen, but sometimes a dream is enough to sustain you through a difficult day.

So I’ve decided to do what I can to spread a little optimism and to fight a little fear by saying aloud the things I’d like to make happen in my writing life in the year ahead. Here are my wild, exciting, ambitious dreams for 2025. I’d love for you to share a couple of your dreams for an area of your life in the comments below.

My Goals and Dreams for 2025

Of course, my number one dream is for as many people as possible to read The Mademoiselle Alliance and to love the story and be inspired by Marie-Madeleine. For everyone to know what she did, what she sacrificed, and how she, and her 3,000 agents, changed the world. But more specifically, this is what I’m dreaming of:

• I’d love for The Mademoiselle Alliance to land me back on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s been a couple of years since I made the list and it is very lovely to see your name on that page

• I’d also love for The Mademoiselle Alliance to capture the attention of a production company for a film or TV series. I feel like this is my most filmable book, and it would be amazing to see Marie-Madeleine’s story on screen

• I’m going to hand in my manuscript for my 2026 book to my publisher and I want them to be as excited about the book as I am when they read it. Then I’d love to find another idea that I truly adore so I can begin writing my next book, which will come out in some future year

• I want to meet lots of readers and sign lots of books while I’m on tour from March-June

• And I also want to remember that life is not just writing and that, while I love writing, I love lots of other things too and I need to give time and attention to all the things I love

So, a short and sweet list of writing dreams. As I said, I’d love for you guys to share a couple of your 2025 dreams so we can all make the year ahead an optimistic one.

What I’ve Been Working On

I might be at the beach, but I have been working, I promise! In fact I love working down here. I'm lucky that I can work anywhere so long as I have my laptop and, while I have been pretty busy, the view is making it not feel quite so much like hard work.

My 2026 book is due to my publisher the first week of February. I may need an extra week as there were a couple of things I had to do in late December (exhaustively cross-checking sources in The Mademoiselle Alliance, for one) that took up quite a bit of time. Given I’ve never asked for an extension in my life, I’m guessing I’ll get the extra week.

I’ve really loved writing this new book and I’ll be sad to let it go! I always say that every book has something that comes easy and something that comes hard and, for this one, the thing that was hard was my self-doubt. Self-doubt never goes away, it seems, and sometimes it can be almost crippling.

For at least the first half of 2024, I was convinced that I was tackling something way too grandiose, something that I didn’t have the skills for, that I was grossly overreaching. But, in reality, I was putting way too much pressure on myself.

I had a breakthrough in the middle of the year when I came down to my beach house and immersed myself in just the book and nothing else. Somehow, sitting outside on the deck one morning, cup of tea in hand, I let myself relax into a writing prompt that I’d randomly chosen to play around with. The words that came out of that exercise now form the prologue of the book and, most importantly, gave me my voice—voice is something I wrote about in this post from last year.

Writers Don’t Sing, But Their Stories Do

It reminded me how important it is to have fun when I’m writing. I write because I love it, but if I get too in my head about it, then I stop having fun and the writing becomes harder. That’s another thing I’m going to try to remember this year.

So I’ve now finished my second-to-last draft of the book and have one more draft to go, which is usually a lighter redraft, where I’m focussing on my word choices, making sure that everything makes sense, that I haven't dropped any plot strands along the way, and that, overall, it feels like a good read. So I’ll probably pick it up next week, re-read what I have, mark the manuscript up in red pen, then sit down at the computer and take in all those changes.

I've also been very working on all things The Mademoiselle Alliance-related. This past week, I’ve finished the final proofread for the book. I have to say that by the end of it, I was glad to put the book down for a while. Since October, I’ve done US copyedits, Australian copyedits, and then a US proofread and now an Australian proofread. (And yes, we do feed back and forth to each publishing house any mistakes that anyone finds). So, in two months I’ve deeply studied each and every line of the book multiple times. When you've done that, you need a bit of a break from the story for a couple of weeks!

But while I'm having a bit of a break from the storyline, I'm fully immersed in all things publicity and marketing. Last week I shared the prologue with my paid subscribers and the feedback I got from you guys was amazing. There’s nothing that makes a nervous author happier than people sating they’re hooked after just a few pages.

Read the First Chapter of The Mademoiselle Alliance!

We’ve also nailed down the tour and it’s looking fabulous! It’s by far the biggest tour I’ve ever done. I won't be visiting every state—one of my daughters is doing her ATAR this year and she needs time and love, and we’re also hosting a French exchange student for 7 weeks from May-June (my son is over there right now on his leg of the 7 week exchange), so I need to be with my family.

I should have details and booking links for most events in next month’s newsletter but if you’re very intrepid and really can’t wait, some events are already open for booking—if you do a Google search for The Mademoiselle Alliance events, you’ll probably find them!

The North American proofs of The Mademoiselle Alliance are looking glorious by the beach.

Recommendations Roundup

Books

One of the things I love most about the holiday period is taking the time to read during the day. I know reading during the day isn't revolutionary, but for me, it is. I mostly read for pleasure at night, just before I go to sleep. My daytime reading is always work-related research books. But while I’ve been here at the beach house, I’ve been sitting out on my deck reading.

The first book I read was The Wedding People by Alison Espach. What a way to end 2024 and start 2025! I absolutely loved it.

I'd seen it around in a lot of in the 2024 “best of” lists, and also here on Susbtack, recommended by people whose tastes are similar to mine. The blurb promised a story about a recently-divorced woman arriving at a Newport hotel in the depths of despair and getting caught up in a wedding party. Sounded interesting, so I picked it up, started to read and—I know it's a cliché to say it—but I couldn't put it down

It deals with big stuff and has a lot of insight into how we could live our lives versus how we actually do live our lives. It also has a lot of very wise things to say about love and relationships and how we judge ourselves. I loved main character Phoebe, a woman who’s settled for less than she wanted because she, in a wonderful link to the theme of this month’s newsletter(!), stopped dreaming—life made her afraid to dream.

The story is sprinkled with very funny moments and very beautiful moments. I felt like it was the perfect summer read and I definitely recommend it.

Our beach house lit up at night. You can just see the deck out the front where I sit and read during the day.

Regular followers of this newsletter know that I loved Coco Mellors’ Blue Sisters in 2024. I'd heard lots of good things about her debut novel, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, which Santa was kind enough to deliver to me on Christmas Day. With eager anticipation, I sat out on my deck with it a couple of days after Christmas.

What I’ve found so far is lots of gorgeous prose—she’s such a good writer—but also, unexpectedly, a very similar vibe to Lucky's life in Blue Sisters. So I’ve put it down for a bit. I think I need to leave a bigger gap between the two books, make sure I’ve forgotten Blue Sisters and therefore don't feel quite so much like I’m reading the same book again.

Have you read both books? What did you think?

Screen

Whenever I'm away in Busselton with my kids, we always choose a television series that we can watch together in the evening. This time, we chose Nobody Wants This. To recap, my kids are now 18, 16 and 14. The two eldest are girls, the youngest is a boy. Sometimes it can be hard finding something that suits all of us, especially as my 18-year-old is very hard to persuade into watching a TV series—she prefers movies. She doesn't like to be left hanging at the end of the season; she likes a conclusion.

So she was the hardest to sell and, I have to say, she wasn't absolutely convinced by the end of the series. My 14 year old son and 16 year old daughter really enjoyed it, as did I. I know there's been some debate about the portrayal of Jewish people in the series, which I'm not really in a position to comment on. Essentially, the series is about a Jewish rabbi who falls in love with a non-Jewish woman, which, of course, causes a whole lot of problems. Can love conquer all?

I thought there were lots of genuinely funny moments and it was very easy to watch. It won’t make my “best of” list, but it was a great series to relax with over summer.

I also watched the second Gladiator movie. Do we need another movie about gladiators killing men and beasts in the Roman Arena? Probably not. It’s basically a more Hollywood-ised version of the first: gorier and with less story. I wouldn’t rush out and see it.

Links

• My last book, The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard, is about a famous woman who gets turned into something she isn’t by the media. If you look on Goodreads, you’ll see that some reviewers think that would never actually happen in real life. So I’m just going to say two words: Blake Lively. Thank you Megan Twohey for this piece, which shows just how much work some people will put into ruining a famous woman who doesn’t do what she’s told. And that there are other women out there whose job it is to work this hard at taking down another woman is shocking beyond belief.

• This piece by

  Lincoln Michel
  is a fair and thoughtful discussion of what can happen when writers and publishing houses chase trends. I know a few writers who are working on IP-related stories for publishers at the moment because, as in the Gladiator reboot, readers and movie viewers seem to really enjoy the same set of characters or franchise being redone and redone. Is it a craving for comfort? I’m trying to be optimistic here and not believe that our brains are turning to mush and this is all we’re capable of consuming!!

• And, finally, this is a must-read. Its headline asks the question: what would a woman do to an unconscious man if she thought no one was watching? A thought-provoking, slightly terrifying and, of course, heartbreaking read about women and violence and the neverendingness of it all. Trigger warning on this one.

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I don’t want to close out this newsletter without mentioning everyone in LA who’s been affected by the fires. I understand that the California Fire Foundation is a good place to donate to if you’d like to help out those who need it.

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That’s it from me this month. In spite of those last few links that I shared I'm looking forward optimistically to 2025. If people like Gisèle Pelicot keep speaking out and people like Megan Twohey keep writing about women who’ve been exploited by men, if we keep buying great books that are written by human authors who put their hearts into what they write, then I’d like to think we really can change the world, small piece by small piece. Let me know in the comments if you’ve chosen a word for 2025, or if you’ve got some dreams you’d like to share. Thanks again for being here.