Welcome to The Resilient Author for 2025!
Grounding ourselves, and finding strength and focus for the year to come
Resilience: your next brave step forward
(especially when the ground is shifting beneath your feet)
A warm welcome to subscribers old and new as I kick off The Resilient Author for 2025. For those of you just joining in, this is not a ‘how to write’ Substack – although I do explore writing in many different forms and contexts. My work here focuses more on what it’s like to be a writer and creative thinker at this particular moment in time, with an emphasis on how we can support ourselves and thrive. It’s about pushing into our uniqueness as well as finding our common ground, because I’m fascinated by all the different things we’re thinking about and talking about, our imperatives and concerns.
I’m a psychological-suspense fiction writer, but I also like digging into social issues, as well as communication in general, and exploring how language and culture work together. And I’m all about striving to write better and work smarter, but I don’t want that to be at the expense of enjoying each day and finding the fun and balance in my work and life. And this, my friends, is the ongoing challenge.
At the end of last year, I had lots of discussions about the persistent overwhelm and busyness that everyone seemed to be feeling - including me. Christmas was suddenly upon us at the speed of a bullet train, and there seemed to be a sense of resignation around this: we’re all exhausted, but this is just life, now … isn’t it?
At the same time, my inbox became flooded with end-of-year reading lists (I contributed to this and sent my own out too). Now, I usually love a good reading list – I take notes and update my own want-to-read lists – but this time there were so many of them – predominantly from places and people I love – that in the end I just decided to give up as I couldn’t keep up and it began to feel stressful - so many books and so little time.
Is this what it feels like to mentally drown in information overload? To have to switch off from things I truly value because there’s just too much of it, coming at me all the time?
This experience has made me take another long, hard look at this Substack. I absolutely love writing here, but I’m writing it for you, and I want it to be something you really look forward to rather than clogging up your inbox with another thing to read. I want to take up only a few minutes of your precious time each week. And I want you to come away feeling you’ve gained some kind of value from it: comfort, insight, or an interesting topic to reflect on. My main focus is on digging deeper into creative resilience because that’s something we all need and there’s so much to explore around it. I’ll also continue to mention all the other things I’m working on – books, courses, etc – so that if you’re interested you can go and access them, but my primary goal here is to build enduring thought-pieces and conversations for writers that help support the unique, soul-sustaining work that only you can do.
If you’ve been here a while you’ll have already watched me play around with the format, trying different things while figuring out my focus. This year, I’m working more to a structure, and you’ll get a post at the end of each week, on a Thursday or Friday. These will often be general topic posts, but I also write two specific features each month, which are:
My author notes: a once-a-month round-up of interesting news and insights from the industry plus my personal events and a recap of my month on Substack. Here I’ll discuss the big topics of the moment, but I’ll also try to find some extra things of interest that you might have missed.
My writing journal: a look at a personal aspect of my experiences around writing and publishing and what I’m up to. This is the only section where you’ll see a paywall as there will be some additional elements for paid subscribers – but I promise I will never cut my writing off mid-sentence or mid-idea, and there will be plenty in this one for free subscribers too!
My paid crew will also get access to valuable extras throughout the year, including bonus articles, first access and discounts to any events and courses, and the codes to my locked webpage where I’ll be adding all kinds of writing goodies - I hope to kick this off properly in February, so watch this space.
I now have an archive of over 75 articles, and you can browse these either in my Welcome post or by going onto my homepage. If you’re looking to kick the year off by building resilience then I wrote a three-post series about different aspects of resilience that you may find useful (see links below). Simon Sinek’s work on infinite resilience continues to cushion me as we go into a year of considerable political change, where black is becoming white, and up is becoming down. Now, more than ever, we need to champion the thinkers and writers we trust and spread these voices far and wide. So I’m also planning to make 2025 a year of sharing as much as I can.
Right now, I’m in my writing bunker, working furiously on a draft of a new novel so that I’ve - hopefully - got the first full draft sorted by the time the promo for my April release When She Was Gone kicks in. So other than my posts I’ll be a bit quiet in January - and I’ll be properly getting back into Substack and online sharing next month.
Wherever you’re at right now, and whatever you’re focusing on, I’m cheering you on in taking your next brave step forward. Thanks for being part of this community, and I hope you’ll enjoy all the posts coming your way from The Resilient Author this year.
Sara x
FOR MORE READING ON RESILIENCE:
