S.C Newland - Writer

I'm currently enjoying BBC Maestro and access to innumerable writers, and blow me, today is the day Isabel Allende the Chilean‑American author walks to her office, has a coffee, sits down and begins writing her new novel.  She chooses January 8th as the sacred day to start. The end day, is not clear. But it's all about making a start. Wonder what she'll come up with this year? Fun fact: She once wrote a Zorro novel. She is one of the world’s most widely read Spanish‑language authors. Her breakthrough novel,  The House of the Spirits , began as a letter to her dying grandfather and established her signature blend of memory, politics, and magical realism. Exiled after Chile’s 1973 coup, she transformed personal loss into stories marked by resilience and fierce compassion. Her later works, from  City of the Beasts  to  A Long Petal of the Sea , continue to explore identity, exile, and the endurance of love. She has received major honours, including the Preside...

Today celebrates the birth of J.R.R. Tolkien, famous for writing The Hobbit. He began it almost accidentally after scribbling “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” on a student paper in the early 1930s. It took several years of work as he shaped the Middle-earth world. The style is warm, archaic, and audience‑centred, inviting readers to imagine alongside him. He used a past‑tense, storyteller’s voice with occasional first‑person intrusions from an implied narrator. It was published in 1937. He wrote it partly for his children and partly from his love of language, legend, and you could say world discovery. Picture AI generation

Here’s to another twelve months of chasing sentences, wrestling with commas, and finding inspiration in unexpected places. May your drafts surprise you, your characters challenge you, and your stories lead you somewhere you didn’t know you needed to go. Now where's that coffee... Cheers