What to expect from me in 2025

nosebag #26

Hello everyone and a very happy 2025 to you! Today is the 5th day of said New Year, and I hope you are settling into it well now and have lots of high hopes and extravagant dreams on your To Do List.

This Sunday nosebag is usually a little mosey through everything I’ve been reading and thinking about over the past week, and it’s usually only for paid subscribers, but as it’s the first after the Christmas break, I thought I’d keep it free and use it as a way of touching base with you and sharing a little of my own hopes and dreams for 2025, for this substack…and beyond!

For those of you who don’t know, for almost all of 2024 I’ve been writing a new book against the clock. I would like to do a post soon to share with you the timeline of that process, since it’s one of the questions I get asked the most: how does a book all ‘happen’, from first idea to publication day? Put simply though, I spoke to my agent about the idea at the end of Jan ‘24, the contract was signed in May and by the end of July, the first draft had been submitted. Since the start of September it’s been Edits Central and we are now at the ‘proofs’ stage with a publication date of April 10th in our sights. (no it still doesn’t have a cover, therein lies another story!)

So I guess it goes without saying that I’ll be talking a fair bit about the book for the next few weeks! I’m very excited about how the topic brings together so many areas that interest me: women’s health; how sex matters; the wrongful pathologisation of the female body; disconnection and disrespect for nature; feminism; and yes, food - food as a reflection of our culture and principles; food as a direct way back to key human values we are currently on the brink of losing.

I’ll also try not to go on TOO much about the importance of pre-orders.

BUT PLEASE PRE-ORDER IT!!!

If you want to support me (or any writer!) one of the best things you can do is preorder their book. This is because publishers, agents, booksellers etc all pay great attention to pre-publication sales figures and base their expectations and plans for the book around them. It also makes a difference to getting on those ‘bestseller’ lists - we can only live in hope but wouldn’t it be nice to be a Sunday Times Bestseller?! And it’s pre-orders that can make that kind of dream come true!

So here’s a link to pre-order from Amazon, although you should be able to do so via any good bookshop.

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We’ve had a little break from our monthly writing group, Writing for Change, and I’m grateful to those of you who were patient with me while we did so. I’m now raring to go and looking forward to our first meet of 2025. We usually meet on the last Thursday of the month from 6.30 to 8.30pm, so our next meet will be 30th January. (There was some talk about moving it to Wednesdays, which I’m open to…let me know in the comments what you prefer.)

For those of you who don’t know, Writing for Change is a two hour zoom writing group, with a focus on writing as a form of activism and way of making things better. If you want to get a flavour of these sessions, you can look back through the archive here.

More info on the meeting, including a zoom link, will be sent out to paid subscribers later this month.

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As a general rule, the pattern of this substack is:

Early week: a post from me on The Mule - this can be a comment piece on a current story, book news, or anything that is on my mind that I want to get down on the page. I like to keep this substack open and as wide-ranging as I can. I know some of you are here for ‘gender critical’ content, but I’m a real person and I have other interests that I hope you’ll come along with me for, and enjoy. Sometimes paywalled from the start, other times open access for the first week or so.

Friday: The Word is Woman - an ongoing project where I document the erasure of women from language and life. (Thanks for the examples you continue to send me!).

Sunday: The Nosebag, a little smorgasbord of everything I’ve been writing and thinking about over the past week, with suggested podcasts, books, films, articles and more. (only for paid subscribers)

As well as this, I’d like to explore some video posts or more podcasting in 2025, and I’d also like to run some longer writing workshops or other webinars (perhaps helping people understand more about UPF?) - watch this space! And do always feel free to tell me what YOU would like to see more of.

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In terms of my own New Year resolutions, after a year of reading scientific papers about kimchi and the microbiome etc, I’d very much like to nurture my own creative spirit a bit. I know that writing a book - any book - IS a creative process, but in non-fiction there’s an awful lot of research involved and then the creative part is tying things all together in a way that hopefully won’t send readers to sleep. I’ve been very regimented and disciplined, and now I’d like to let my imagination fly a bit. For me this is going to mean reading fiction, and hopefully writing some, and maybe some poetry too. I’ve been working on a children’s fiction book for a long time now, and had to mostly shelve it while I worked on UPW. I want to finish that and I’ve also bought two lovely big notebooks that are waiting for me on my desk. I don’t know what I’ll fill them with, but that’s the joy of a fresh start, isn’t it? I might do a course or two - I’ve been looking at Arvon, and Faber. Let me know if you know of other good ones, especially poetry? There must be someone with a great poetry course / writing group on substack? Perhaps I’ll meet you there…

In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your Sunday.

Oh and here’s Polly the Pup for you in a frosty orchard. She’s getting so big now. We call her The Camel.

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My substack is entirely funded by you, the reader. To support me to keep writing, please consider a paid subscription, which costs less than a fancy coffee each month. If you can’t afford a paid sub, make sure you take out a free one so that you never miss a post.

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Alternatively you can buy me a coffee / wine / gin….