✨Bestselling Romance Author Jo Segura on What NOT To Do When Dealing with Rejection; and Our Audience Shares Their Writing Resolutions ✨

Plus, Carly and CeCe's written query critiques from last week's show, and registration for the Deep Dive Virtual Retreat continues!

Happy New Year’s Eve, writing friends!

Where does the time go? It seems impossible that it’s nearly 2025 already but here we are, so let’s talk New Year’s resolutions. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, it’s hard to resist the temptation of looking at the coming of a new year as a fresh start, a time of stock-taking and an opportunity to look ahead to where you’re going (particularly when it comes to writing, which is a very goal-oriented and future-focussed endeavour). Whether you call them resolutions, things you’re going to “stop/start/continue,” or something else, we were curious to know the most important thing you did last year to improve your writing and what you’re planning to do in the year ahead, so we posed these questions over on The Epilogue (our chat for writers on Instagram), and the answers did not disappoint! Check out our round-up below to get some ideas to help you make 2025 your best writing year yet! 🎉🍾🥂

We’ve also got Carly and CeCe’s written critiques of the queries from last week’s episode of 📕Books with Hooks🪝, as well as a Q&A with “kissing stories” writer Jo Segura (whose latest, Temple of Swoon, is out next week). Jo’s answers to our questions are full of things our readers might want to consider pilfering to add to their list of 2025 goals (although not giving into imposter syndrome is going to be a hard one to achieve for a lot of us, it’s certainly worth trying!). A lawyer by day and USA Today bestselling author (!) by night, Jo also has insights to share on time management (as you might imagine), as well as managing one’s social media presence as an author, and coping with rejection. 💏⚖️✍🏼

In last week’s newsletter we shared Marian Schembari’s awesome video talking about her “unhinged” approach to teaching herself to write; unfortunately, Marian’s name was incorrect in two of its appearances, and there was an error in referring to the title of her book. We are sincerely sorry to Marian for these mistakes. We are, however, thrilled to report that lots of you found it the video incredibly helpful (including one reader who let us know she’s already started making her own “Schembari Sheet”!!)—if you haven’t watched it yet, you definitely should!

Finally, we want to close by thanking all of you for being here with us in 2024. Your response to The Shit No One Tells You About Writing over the past year—your subscriptions, your feedback and reshares—is so incredibly appreciated. More importantly, we hope it’s an indicator that you feel we’ve given you something of real value to help you achieve your writing goals.

Happy New Year! 🥳🎉🍾

❤️ The Shit No One Tells You About Writing Team