The Resilient Author wrap-up for 2024

It's been a year of making beautiful connections in ways that AI can only dream of!

I’ve had a brilliant time writing on Substack this year. It’s been lovely to see this space growing, and to connect with so many people and their different styles and themes of writing here. In 2025 I hope to keep building this into a really strong resource to support and nourish writers, and my main problem right now is too many ideas and not enough time! So for the next few weeks I’ll be taking stock as I return to drafting my new novel, while getting ready for another busy year.

Thank you for being here and inviting me into your precious, overflowing inbox on a regular basis! I know what a privilege this is, and I don’t take it lightly. Thank you to everyone who’s left a comment or sent an email during the year saying that you’re really enjoying and getting value from my writing here: this always spurs me on. And a huge thank you to my paid subscribers for supporting my work and making it possible for me to continue.

Right now, there are writers just like us in certain countries who are imprisoned for daring to speak their truths. There are writers in the US who have seen their work taken out of libraries and schools and mislabelled as pornographic or offensive by a few people with an outsized ability to sway a large number. We are fortunate, here in Australia, to have the freedom to write, speak and share our views, beliefs and truths, and freedom of speech is something I never want to take for granted. I don’t know what 2025 will bring, but I fervently hope we’ll always find ways to connect and reconnect with one another – and that we’ll rise to face the challenges together and push back against everything that threatens our unique ability as humans to reach each other, empathise, and be heard and seen within our stories. I also hope we get time at the end of each day or week to sit around our ‘campfires’ – in whatever form that takes - and share the simple, good things in life: music, food, stories, laughter. This is my Christmas wish for us all, and my final hope is that whatever challenges and obligations we might face, we can get at least a little time for some breathing space and a good book.

My reading time this year has been strange and disjointed – I’ve had to stop in the middle of quite a few books to switch to reading something else, often because of work requirements, and I’ve struggled to get into some books I expected to love (which could easily be about me and my level of focus). However, as always there were gems to discover amongst my reading pile, so here’s a list of some of the books I loved in 2024:

• The Future by Naomi Alderman

• The Song of Achilles by Madeleine Miller

• More Than You’ll Ever Know by Katie Gutierrez

• What Happened to Nina? by Dervla McTiernan

• Funny Story by Emily Henry

• The Venice Hotel by Tess Woods

• Cutler by David Whish-Wilson

• Deep Water: The World in the Ocean by James Bradley

• From Here to the Great Unknown (audio version) by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough, read by Julia Roberts

What’s on my Christmas list? Well, the psych suspense thriller lover in me is going to ask for The God of the Woods by Liz Moore - I’ve heard a bit about this one recently and it sounds right up my street. I also really want to read Stan Grant’s Murriyang: Song of Time, one of the first books to be published by Bundyi Publishing, a new and exciting First Nations imprint of Simon & Schuster, spearheaded by

Anita Heiss

. This book is described in Bookseller & Publisher as ‘a memoir that explores themes of identity, colonisation and belonging through the unique lens of Grant’s intersecting Wiradjuri descent and Christian faith. With self-awareness, Grant reflects on how these aspects of his identity, though seemingly at odds with one another, have been a source of comfort through trials…’ It sounds like a beautiful read to mark the changing of these particular years.

I hope you get everything you want this Christmas, whether it’s in a stocking or something else that fills your heart. And if you’d like to give yourself and me an extra early gift for 2025, I’d love you to consider pre-ordering When She Was Gone, as all the early orders help the book buzz begin and get bookshops interested in ordering a few more copies for their shelves.

I’ll be back in January to pick things up again, with an exploration of what writers might want to think about and prioritise in 2025. (Paid subscriptions will be paused from today until my return because of the longer Christmas/January break.) Meanwhile, I’m sending lots of Christmas good wishes and cheer from the Foster household, where we are currently captivated by the antics of our crazy puppy, Luna, and her beautiful zest for life!

Wishing you a wonderful Christmas, and a very happy New Year.