Oh, hi twenty-five.

January inventory and the grittiest of guilds.

My darlings,

We are nineteen days into 2025 and I’ve been having such a slow and delicious affair with this new year.

The first week I spent in a love bubble truly delighted by the thrill of learning and falling head-over-heels in love with a new brilliant human. We watched sunsets and cooked food and hung fairy lights and begun creating the outdoor magic space because I have decided I am in my dinner party era.

Then, on the sixth I headed to The Blue Mountains to come to Varuna, The Writers House. A beautiful yellow 1940’s home that has housed a family of writers, and then as inherited gift for the last thirty plus years has been a house writers have retreated to to create and ponder and rest and write. It has been a dream of mine to attend for many years.

Image Description: The trees and sun setting in a cloudy sky, a small blue office on the grounds of Varuna.

The last two weeks here have been so deeply nourishing in every way. I’ve gotten to cohabit with six sensational writers who I’ve adored getting to know. There’s been fire places, and communal meals, and rest, books, a Zumba class, giggling and my creative heart feels so present and nourished. I finished my fourth novel earlier this week and sent it off to be read. It’s a young adult that I’ve been playing with on and off for years. And now she is finished. And I don’t know what will happen next but the simple fact that there was a longing to tell the story, and that story has now been told feels big.

Tendrils of an idea have been pulled from the ether, through my brain and heart, poured out of my fingers onto the page, so that where there was was nothing there is now a whole seventy thousand word thing, and that feels equally like hard work and magic all at once.

Image Description: Me in the kitchen the morning I knew I was going to finish the novel about to make myself breakfast feeling delighted. Claire is a plus-size white woman with black hair and tattoos, she’s wearing a white crop top and pink pants with sunflowers on them.

I head home tomorrow, and back to work on Wednesday, and the pursuit to maintain the peace, clarity, devotion to my writing, ease and embodiment I’ve found in the last eight weeks of trips and overseas adventures and writing retreats will begin. I’ll be accountable here to you as I work out how to do the things amidst all the other mundane, necessary things. As I’m sure you’ll understand and feel deeply…this life caper, this balancing act we all do, to remain true to ourselves whilst supporting ourselves in the hellscape structures we exist within, is not for the faint of heart.

I’ve chosen my word and themes for the year.

WORD: TRUEHEARTED. adj// faithful, loyal.

THEMES: EMBODIED | ADVENTURE | DEVOTION

I’ve come up with my bingo list of actions which features things like going camping, making an apple pie, and seeing glow worms.

I’ve also created a bullet journal where every day I’m tracking something that has delighted me and that I feel deeply grateful for. I’ve also created a grid where I’m giving my days and my health a score out of five. Something in me wants the data of these coloured-in squares. Proof of a life lived. What’s that saying…the years are fast but the days are long. There’s something about presence and the delight in the micro that I’m pondering. In the future I know I would have forgotten about rescuing a lady bird in the Lawson community pool right before the skies opened in a wild storm as me and my new writer friends made hilarious jokes in the water. Now I won’t. Now it’s written down captured in print as a moment of significance. I can’t fathom the macro look back on a life that forgets that tiny micro piece of joy. The specificity of these joys and delights is making me zoom out, ushering in an ease to the frequent anxiety of merely existing in a body that feels all the things at this moment in time.

What has delighted you today?

Whack it in the comments, please, I really want to know.

Image Description: Me in my togs wrapped in a towel, glasses covered in rain, as the skies opened in quick storm.

I’ve also come up with an idea for this delicious space and am creating something for the paid subscriber, who I call the Grit Guild in 2025.

Let’s write a novelette together.

I’ve been pondering for a long time what content paid babes would enjoy that would feel dopamine rich for me – I don’t just want to whack a newsletter in your inbox that doesn’t serve your busy life - so, in the shower the other day, where, let’s be honest, many grand ideas (and perfect retorts to the fuckheads) appear, I decided on a creative option.

I’m gonna write a spicy rom-com novelette with Grit Guild input.

You’ll get a chapter a month.

And in a choose-your-own-adventure fashion each month there’ll be some polls that will inspire where we will go to next. Based on the results of those polls I’ll keep writing. At the end of 2025 I will have written a novelette co-conspired with The Grit Guild.

Grit Guild babes will get to feature in the Special Acknowledgments section at the end of the novelette. Maybe it’ll become something bigger and longer, or maybe it’ll become the beginning of my dalliance into self-publishing. Who knows. We’ll discover it together. But, let’s fucking create a thing that delights us and speaks to our whims in the moment. Yes? Yes.

So, my spicy romance Grit Guild babes lets journey together.

This week I’ve been positing polls and question boxes on my Instagram for this very reason…I’ll pool that data and at the end of this month and I’ll introduce you to our central character who we’ll journey with this year…and who knows what we’ll make happen to her but she for sure is gonna get laid. Who with? Who knows. But you know they’ll be dreamy. And we’ll work it out together.

That’s it. That’s the pitch.

If this doesn’t take your fancy – zero pressure there’ll still be pearlescent ponderings dropped her whenever they take my fancy.

Image Description: An Instagram post by tinypricksproject of a embroidered handkerchief that reads: “when the macro is dark, we need to be extra soft and sweet in the micro” a quote by Kelly Corrigan.

ADVICE I’VE GIVEN AND NEEDED THIS MONTH THAT YOU MIGHT NEED TO:

Let’s simmer on the pressure we put on ourselves, shall we? Let’s control the controllable and let future us figure it out. Trust that future you will know. Future you is resilient and clever and capable and they will work it out.

MY HYPERFIXATION SONG:

Life Will Be by Cleo Sol

I can see the sadness in your eyes
But I can see the magic in your life
But they don't know
That it took you your whole life to rediscover
You're only here to love and to be free

Oh-oh, life will be
Just you believe in you

Hey! Babe town, I hope you’re okay and doing and wearing and crafting and smooching and leaving whatever and whoever you want to. We know that chaos is inevitable so let’s try and be as delighted as possible as often as we can. Let’s sift through the grit and make pearls, then let’s wear the shit out of those pearls.

Love,

Claire.

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Pearler is usually written and created on the unceded lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here in Meanjin, but this post was written on the unceded land of the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples, and I pay my deep respect to First Nation Elders past and present. This always was, and always will be Aboriginal land.

I don’t believe I can wholeheartedly support sovereignty of this land I live, love and work on without acknowledging the liberation of Palestine and honoring the impacts of colonisation of Indigenous people everywhere else.

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