Presenting at online conferences and for various organizations. Running writing workshops. Publishing a novel. And being named one of ten New Voices of Aotearoa. There is no doubt about it: 2025 has been a massive year for me, with a huge step forward within my writing career. But there were also massive steps forward within my physical and mental wellbeing too. And here's hoping that 2026 sees the momentum continue. It's that time of year again, when I look back at the year just been and celebrate my successes.

There is a reason no one has ever found Santa's workshop. It's because everyone has been looking in the wrong place. The North Pole is really in Antarctica.

Most people enjoy the twinkling stars, but twinkling stars are a nightmare for astronomers, blurring images and diminishing the science quality of telescopes.

Art, in all its forms, is a known therapeutic tools. And you can tell the mood I was in when I wrote certain scenes.

Alt: two Disney men probably from Hercules, debating "both? both is good."

Sometimes, the best ideas for world-building and our novel settings come from external sources. But I never thought that a course on writing male voices as a female writer would lead to thoughts and ideas that play with color.

The oddest of details will find our manuscripts. And we really do draw on our personal memories. For me, it was the pink sanitation fluid from my time at working at a dairy factory that found my novel Dancing in the Purple Rain.

Rushing the publication process is so tempting, but a BIG mistake. Here is just a few of the flavors of the rush-the-process beast.

Winter was upon them and the chill leaked through the walls and windows. The young girl shivered, wrapping herself in the blankets that her mother had laid across her shoulders.

A deadly internet challenge and a global pandemic were what I needed to allow the full story to form in my head. However, I wanted to distance my story from the events of 2020. Shifting the story into the future provided challenges of its own.

It was a novel that took me many years to just get out of my head. And it wasn’t because of the inability to write, but rather I struggled to piece together the lie. The opening scene (which you can read on my blog) was written back in 2017 (something like that). And I had a rough idea as to what I wanted the story to be. But I was stuck on the lie that my main character was being told. Until the pandemic hit in 2020. Suddenly, the last piece of the puzzle I needed fell into place.