Dear Sunshiners,

Why do you write?

This is a question novelists are sometimes asked, and it’s usually novelists who are asked it presumably because the motivations for non-fiction writers are clearer: they want to convey facts or document events.

Sometimes novelists ask it of ourselves too, and of each other. and I have talked about it on our podcast, Dear Rach & Soph – and it’s hard to write that without it looking like a plug, and I suppose it is that, but mainly I just want to state the facts!

Back to the question at hand: Why do I write?

I guess I write because I can. I’ve been doing it since I was a child. I write as a hobby, over at (another plug-like mention, but they’re hard to avoid), and find I’m happiest doing so when I don’t try to write in a style that seems acceptable to the internet – anyone with an SEO plugin will be familiar with the warnings that come up about sentence lengths and paragraphs being too long and not having subheadings. Too bad. If I want to write a long sentence about why a certain artist is impressive, I’ll do it, and the SEO will suffer but it’s a mug’s game trying to guess what search engines want – and why should we even try? We’re humans, not robots.

The sort of writing – and interviewing – I do at Sunburnt Country Music has informed my writing of fiction, and it took me a while to realise they were motivated by the same thing. And that the thing is related to teaching yoga, which I wrote about in the last issue of The Sunshine Society.

How they’re all related comes down to one simple principle: whether you’re in my yoga class or reading my novel, or watching/listening to a podcast episode I’ve made, I want you to leave the experience feeling better about life and the world than you did when you started.

Students come to a yoga class partly for a workout, I guess, but if that’s all they wanted they could go to an aerobics class instead (do they still exist?). They come to a yoga class because, whether consciously or subconsciously, they want a transformative experience. My yoga teacher, Shiva Rea, refers to herself as a river guide, and while I’m ocean-leaning more than river-fond, it’s something I understand. The river is, in one sense, creative flow. So I’m the river guide too, whenever someone is in my class.

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This applies to writing fiction as well. I’m the river guide for the characters and the story, initially. Once they go out into the world in book form, I’m the river guide for the reader. The journey is the reader’s own, but I feel it’s my responsibility to make sure that at journey’s end the reader feels their time has been well spent and that, hopefully, they feel better than they did at the start. That doesn’t mean I write happy endings – I don’t. I write realistic endings, and the feedback from readers is that these are what make them feel better about things. That’s not the reason I keep writing them; the endings are like that because I write about realistic things, and it’s not realistic to tie everything up in a bow. Readers also say the books are comforting, and in this day and age I can’t think of a better compliment.

It feels … not hard, but tender to admit that this is my motivation for writing. Shouldn’t I be saying that I write because I simply have to, that I can’t not write? That it’s my calling/mission and I don’t know who I am without it?

I do know who I am without it, and I could not do it if I wanted to. I don’t want to. I want to tell stories because I know from personal experience that life can sometimes feel unbearable. Everything one knows or believes in can be taken away, trust eroded, even violence committed, and as a consequence facing the day – each day, day after day – is too hard.

From childhood, for me, stories were a refuge. Stories – books – offered me respite and, yes, comfort and they entertained me too. The entertainment was important because it took me away from myself and the world I inhabited, if only for a little while. The stories helped me believe there were other ways to be that might be better. And, having believed that, I created it. Not all at once, and there were times when other people tried to drag me into mires of their own creation, just so they wouldn’t be alone there, but each time I pulled myself out, the world I made became not just bearable but beautiful.

It’s only through doing that work for myself that I can offer it to others, whether teaching yoga, writing about music or creating fiction in book form. It’s a circular chain of offering, in a way: I offer these stories to you in the hope that they’ll leave you better than you were when you started them, and in turn you may encounter someone who feels better for having met you. And I’m not the god-head here: what I am offered by yoga teachers and authors and musicians keeps feeding me so I can keep making my offerings. It’s circular. My job is to keep myself open to what is offered to me so I can pass it on. In other words: to keep out of my own way, a piece of advice I regularly give to writers when asked!

To quote Ben Lee, one of those musicians whose offerings I’ve been accepting for years, we’re all in this together.

Also, I should really mention that I have a novel coming out on 28 July 2026, called The Frock Shop. Here’s the animation for the cover reveal that took place at the end of April. This is a change in design direction, away from the look and feel of my previous novels, but I felt it was time and the publishers agreed. The designer is the same, through: Christa Moffitt of Christabella Designs.

Love,

Sophie

What I’m reading

Even the Good Girls Will Cry by Melissa Auf der Maur: Melissa Auf der Maur was the bass player for Hole, the band fronted by Courtney Love. I was a bass player at the same time as Auf der Maur joined the band – which was in the wake of the deaths of Love’s husband, Kurt Cobain, and Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff – and thought she had the coolest job in music. Plus I saw Hole love on the tour that is mentioned in the book. The nostalgia was a small reason to want to read the book; Auf der Maur’s writing is the reason I’m enjoying it so much.

Vow of Eternal Night by Lily Crozier: I’m doing an in-conversation with Lily at Words on the Waves on the New South Wales Central Coast on 30 May, so I’m listening to the audiobook in preparation.

What I’m listening to

Dusk by Bud Rokesky: Bud is a favourite Australian country music artist of mine and I interviewed him about this, his second album. While the interview is weeks in the past, this album isn’t letting me go.

I’ve also been lucky to have access to some albums in advance of release, including those by Ella Hooper, Amber Lawrence (plus I helped Amber create her book, The Suburban Cowgirl) and Kingswood, three favourite artists/acts. When I was a teenager dreaming of being a music journalist, this is the sort of thing I would not have believed could come true, and I never take it for granted.

Dear Sunshiners,

It’s been a while since I’ve written to you, but not a while since I’ve been writing. Indeed, I write all the time. By day, as a publisher, I write pitches for novels I’m taking to an acquisitions meeting. I write emails that I craft carefully because I still think that a lot of business correspondence should be worthy of being a letter (the old-fashioned put-it-in-an-envelope kind). I write back-cover blurbs and scripts for sales conferences and one-liners that are meant to encapsulate a whole book so the members of the sales team can talk to booksellers about it in the thirty seconds maximum they have for each title (this is not an exaggeration).

By night I’m writing questions for interviews of country music artists – I do my research, I listen to the music, and the writing of the questions is something I approach as a creative act, because if I do it properly the conversation will be shaped a certain way. That is, a story will be told. While interviewing I always leave room for change – the artist may say something that is worth pursuing down a certain path. That means I have to be prepared to abandon the questions I wrote – if not entirely then somewhat – in order to allow the story to take its shape. When I write those questions I know they’re an outline of a story and the artist will provide the colour and sometimes change that outline too.

Being able to not be worried about or scared of such change and to accept it, even embrace it – for in the change comes the wonder, the surprise, the new information that can alter my understanding – is something I learnt, and continue to learn, by teaching yoga. It’s also something I need while writing fiction.

Some yoga teachers like to have a set sequence, and these days many teacher training courses seem to encourage this too. I wasn’t trained like that. My original teacher, Judy Krupp, with whom I studied for two decades, never taught the same class twice. So when I started teaching, it did not occur to me to do otherwise. What I didn’t realise at the time was that not teaching the same class twice forced me to be creative, and to this day I create a new sequence for each class I teach.

Today (I’m writing this on a Wednesday) I wrote the sequence for the class I’ll teach tomorrow. Usually I’ll start with an element: earth, water, fire or air. That means considering what the weather has been and what it’s forecast to be on the day of the class. If it’s been raining for two days or more, for example, I will not incorporate much that is ‘watery’ – that is, no asanas (postures) or sequences that induce that element in the body – nor will I use much fire, because fire on water makes steam.

The moon cycle and the equinoxes and solstices also have a role to play. At the time of writing we’re a day away from a full moon and not far out from the autumnal equinox, which was on 21 March. Equinoxes and solstices, in my observation, cause humans to retreat or, at least, power down. We go into the caves of our homes and minds, knowing instinctually that we need to rest and restore ourselves. My interpretation of it is that the earth turns into a new phase and our bodies turn with it, which can make us tired, depending on what else we’re doing. No doubt this ‘turning’ is why there are so many rituals around these times of year, across different cultures.

I’ve just observed Navaratri – nine nights for the Mother – which takes place around equinoxes. I was introduced to this observation by my current yoga teacher, Shiva Rea, who has a whole philosophy called Living in Rhythm – in rhythm with the earth and moon. Twice a year, even if I think I don’t have time for the daily ritual of offering and mantra, I will do it, because something always shifts. Even during the times I think I haven’t been that observant – I might have to rush through the stages of the practice to get to the office, for example – it’s worth it, just to be there for those few minutes. At the end of the nine days I will always be glad I participated. And there will always be change. I don’t know what it will be, and I don’t want to know. I just wait to find out.

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It took me a while to realise that so much of my work and life involves change, and not resisting change. I thought – as many of us think – that I didn’t like change. Now I realise I exist in the flow of change and rarely resist it.

While teaching a class, I have my sequence written in a notebook, but I always anticipate change. I might have planned for a fire + air class – as I have this week – and we’ll start and I’ll realise that the backbends I’d believed would be useful for the students are going to be too much this week. And it’s not just a matter of swapping out postures, for a sequence done mindfully is one that is structured as vinyasa krama and involves pratikriyasana (counterpose). That is: the sequence is a story, leading towards a climax, then there is a resolution in the form of pratikriyasana. Within that story there are mini stories: while we are always heading toward the ‘peak’ asana(s) of the sequence, there are poses and counterposes within. That’s so the energies of the asanas are managed correctly in order for the sequence as a whole to be of most benefit to the practitioner. If the balance is off, there may still be benefit but there may not be that unique sensation that comes at the end of a practice that is just right: not only has the body been worked but the mind is still and all is well in the world.

Which brings me back to writing fiction. I make all sorts of plans before I start writing a novel not to avoid change but to invite it. To provide the structure for it. I work up detailed profiles on my main characters. I have a colour-coded table in Microsoft Word in which I start to plot the story, knowing it will change. The table – which I started calling ‘the grid’ for no reason other than that it looks like one – is the canvas for the change. When I start writing the novel, the characters will create the change and I’ll go back to the grid and change the plot that’s coming. I only ever plan ten to fifteen chapters ahead, because change will come and I’ll adjust accordingly. Just as I do when teaching yoga. And while each novel has a ‘peak’ we are heading for, within that there are, as you can now probably guess, poses and counterposes. Each chapter is a sequence, if I can say that. Each chapter needs to have its balance so that the overall balance of the novel is right. The principles that apply in my teaching apply here too: if I go for too much or too little, or if in the middle of change I ignore my instinct about what to do and instead try to rationalise my way into a solution, I can throw the story off balance. I may not know it at the time, but I will by the end when the pratikriyasana doesn’t do the job it’s meant to.

Over my 24 years of teaching yoga I have learnt to trust myself as I not only write the sequence for each week – an act of intense creativity which doesn’t take very long but which completely consumes me in the moment – but change it while the class is happening. I trust my embodied knowledge of what should happen when and what it’s all leading to. Sometimes I make mistakes – if I’m tired or distracted – but I know how to correct them before the class is over, how to bring everyone to the place where they were always meant to arrive.

When I started teaching it felt like jumping into the void, with no net to catch me. Writing used to feel like that too, before I realised how much it was like teaching, and also how little I was rattled by change. If I allow the story to change – if I provide the structure for it then cease all attempts at control – it not only flows but finds its shape. Its poses and counterposes.

What I’m writing now too is an example of that in action. I had planned to write to you first about a talk I gave in March to New South Wales librarians at the State Library, mainly because I wrote a fair bit of it and thought I’d replicate it here. That idea occurred to me when I was in the middle of an intense time that lasted several weeks, and as I already had that piece of writing I thought, Why not share it? Because I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to write anything original.

Such intense times are best interpreted, in my lineage, as tapas – the fire of devotion (not foodstuffs!). Hard times requiring extra effort accompanied by great emotion are more easily managed, I find, when I think of them this way. When the fire feels at its most consuming, reframing it as tapas helps me get through. So then I thought I’d write to you about tapas. Even when I started writing today, that’s what I thought I would write about.

Then I began typing and something else emerged. I could have clung onto the idea I had: I was going to write about tapas!!! But what or who would that have served? All I would have been doing is getting in my own way. And yours. Because whatever I tried to force out in order to stick to my predetermined subject matter would not have flowed the way it needed to. It would have been all pose and no counterpose.

This missive to you is not a thesis. Because I did not set out to write about structure and change and yoga and writing, what you’ve just read doesn’t necessarily ‘make sense’ as it might if I were writing it with rules in mind. Hopefully it flows, though. Hopefully there is a sense of that arc of storytelling that, I now know, runs through most of what I do even when I don’t mean it to. For this feels like the place to stop. It feels like not only the last counterpose but the point at which we all roll over and relax, or sit up and meditate. Whatever you need to do. I’ve brought you to this point. And also, Sunshiners, you’ve brought me to it. The sequences, the stories, don’t have meaning without someone else being there to participate in them.

Om shanti,

Sophie

What I’m reading

Life Drawing by Emily Lighezzolo

Emily is my colleague and also a wonderful writer. Life Drawing won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer at the Queensland Literary Awards and has now been published by UQP. Here’s the blurb:

Maisie and Charlie meet at a life-drawing session as undergraduates: she’s the model, he’s an artist. Their immediate connection carries them across two decades as they navigate the slippery dynamics of friendship, estrangement and family.

Maisie’s story is every woman’s, and Emily Lighezzolo’s bold debut interrogates the collision of art and gaze, desire and consent, muse and meaning. This is a love story. At its core: a woman’s body – seen, touched, loved, hated, commodified and reclaimed. Life Drawing is an award-winning and unflinching novel for our times.

Also reading – always. Thoughtful, provocative, funny, smart, scintillating, challenging, brilliant prose.

What I’m listening to

Big Dream Baby, the forthcoming album from Sydney singer-songwriter Justine Eltakchi. I was sent the album ahead of interviewing this supremely talented artist, and it is sublime. Eltakchi is not a country music artist (if you’re new here you can find my country music life at ) but there’s a country song on the album, which is why her publicist contacted me, and I’m so glad she did because now I have this album in my life. There are various musical styles on the album: pop, soul, even a synth-driven ballad, and it all makes sense together because Eltakchi has chosen styles that are right for each song. She writes songs for other artists and organisations such as Eurovision Australia; now she’s releasing songs she has written for herself, and they are rich, moving songs about family, love and nature. Her voice is just as powerful as her songwriting.

Dear Sunshiners,

This was going to be a piece about the ways in which tennis – the sport I play, watch and keep track of semi-obsessively (as I like to say, ‘I speak fluent tennis’) – has helped me as a writer and continues to. About the fact that ‘cardiovascular chess’, as I like to call it, has trained me to expect the unexpected when writing and adjust quickly. How it has taught me over the years – just as learning instruments has done – that the only way to provide a path for flow (creative or otherwise) is to practise, practise, practise. One may lose a point, or a game, or a match, and it’s all practice.

Yoga has done something similar for me – as I like to say, it’s yoga practice, not yoga perfection – but tennis requires something else. As a singles player, I’m alone out there and alone inside my mind, and I have to be the one to make the decisions and accept responsibility for them. That includes the decision to win or lose, and if you think that winning and losing are things that just happen to a person, well, I can write a separate piece about that.

What tennis requires that is different to what, say, yoga requires is that the decision-making needs to be fast, it needs to be ruthless and it needs to be without regret. The great Rafael Nadal, winner of twenty-two slams, including fourteen at Roland-Garros, was the master of letting go of each point as soon as it had happened. He did not live in regret and it meant he could move on to the next point, and point by point he would win.

Rafa has also been said to be the loveliest man you’ll ever meet as well as the most vicious competitor. That dichotomy has long fascinated me, because it holds within it supposed opposites. It is our collective belief that the vicious competitor cannot also be a gentleman. Yet Nadal is both. So is his countryman and so-called heir, Carlos Alcaraz Garfia – and I say so-called because Alcaraz is in the true inheritor of not only Nadal but Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, the latter of which he defeated just over a week ago in the Australian Open men’s singles final. Yet Carlitos, as he is known, also brings joy to the court. I call him the golden retriever of tennis, bounding around the court as he does, imaginary feathery tail flying, looking like there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.

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For all this supposed lightness on the court, though, in his post-match press conference after that finals win, Alcaraz said he fights the way he does because ‘I hate lose’ (and it should be noted that his English has improved dramatically in the past year, and also I find it remarkable that so many players from non-English-speaking backgrounds are fluent in English, a fact that is totally and absolutely taken for granted). To paraphrase Catherine Whitaker of The Tennis Podcast, he seems more like an ‘I love win’ guy. So again we have these contradictions bound up in the one player: a fun-loving, kind man who always stops for autographs and selfies, yet will not hesitate to take down – over five sets and five hours if necessary – anyone who stands in his way, and look like he’s enjoying himself while doing it.

What does that teach me as someone engaged in writing? What does it teach anyone creating things that they hope go out into the world? So many things, but let’s distil them to this: you don’t have to compromise yourself to be competitive and go after what you want. You can be a writer who loves other people’s books and wants to support other writers and still want to write the best novel in the world. Indeed, that is the job. If I do not set out wanting to write if not the best novel in the world then the best novel I’ve ever written, each time, I am doing readers a disservice. And also letting myself down immensely. I hate lose too.

During the pandemic years, when there were no crowds at tournaments, the players didn’t like it. Watching matches, it was eerie to not have crowds there. The rhythms of everything seemed off. Strange results emerged.

The players need the energy of the crowd to help their creative flow. Alcaraz is now probably the most recognisable example of this, due to his on-court flourishes, his almost balletic way of playing some shots, like the court is his stage and he is performing for our favour.

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Writers – the ones who want to be published, that is – need the energy of the reader to help their creative flow. At least, I do; perhaps I’m generalising too much. But I’m not interested in writing books without it. The symbiosis between my writing and someone reading it is too special. The story only lives when there’s someone else there to animate it. The points are so much more exciting knowing the crowd is there, anticipating an outcome.

So, actually, I did end up writing about what tennis has taught me, but it didn’t go where I thought it did – I did not intend to write about Carlos Alcaraz – and that’s some kind of metatextual example of how writing and tennis are alike. I stayed in the moment of writing this, just as I stay in the moment of playing a point, and adjusted as the ball came to me.

What I meant to focus on – or, rather, who – was the Williams sisters. Because it’s Venus and Serena, especially Serena, who brought me back to tennis. After playing in my childhood and teenage years, staying up late to watch Wimbledon well into my twenties, I drifted away from tennis. Most likely it was because music took over as my main hobby, but I can’t really remember.

In 2012 I was writing some romance novels involving tennis players – they were written under a different name, and are no longer available – and decided to go to tennis lessons while also watching tennis matches again. For some reason I zeroed in on Serena Williams in particular, although I’d been a Venus fan when I’d watched tennis previously. Now, I think I attached to Serena because she too embodies a dichotomy: an incredibly determined competitor who is fun and playful and creative off the court.

Also, Venus wasn’t around much at that time, and we later found out why: she had Sjogren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease which took her a long time to adjust to in order to come back to playing competitively. When I saw her live for the first time, in Melbourne in 2017, she walked onto the court and it was like Nefertiti had arrived, so regal and beautiful was she, and knowing what I did about her illness and what she had come through, I was overwhelmed by emotion.

Serena too has overcome so much. In 2010 she suffered a cut on her foot – due to something falling on it – and resulting surgeries put her in a cast. She would then develop a pulmonary embolism that almost killed her (she almost died of the same condition after giving birth to her first daughter, Olympia, by Caesarean section in 2018). The sisters had also lived through the murder of their older sister Yetunde Price.

I can’t not see all of that when I watch them play – and Venus, at forty-five years of age, is still active on the tour, having just played the Australian Open. (Serena is rumoured to be making a comeback, as a few weeks ago her name appeared on the drug-testing register, which would be a precursor to a return to the tour.) I can look at their tennis for what it is – to this day, Venus has phenomenal groundstrokes and watching her whack a forehand will take your breath away. But I do not want to divorce that tennis from the people they are.

What they have taught me as a writer and a woman, more specifically, is that you can be that vicious competitor – you can want to win (or hate to lose) – and still be feminine and embrace creativity, as they have done throughout their careers with other ventures, and you can forge your own life on terms that are agreeable to you, in defiance of the terms others set for you.

The sisters recently launched a podcast, Stockton Street. I have been planning to start it for a while and coincidentally – or not, because probably my subconscious prodded me – I started listening to it today. I’d planned to write this issue of The Sunshine Society today, and the subject would be tennis, but it was going to be more general. The Williams sisters would not feature much. But, as mentioned above, from tennis I have learnt to play the ball that’s coming to me, and once I listened to the first episode of the podcast I knew I had to play that ball. The Williams sisters had to be a focus of this piece.

They say many interesting things in that first episode alone, and I encourage you to listen to it. Something that Venus said really struck me: ‘You can want it so much that you don’t do the things you need to do to win. You got to stop wanting it and do what it takes to win.’

Doesn’t that look like a dichotomy, on its surface? Isn’t ‘wanting it’ synonymous with ‘winning’? Yet I think this is Venus saying ‘Get out of your own way’ – something I’m fond of saying to myself and to writers asking for advice, but I prefer how she has said it. In writing we can want ‘it’ – publication, adulation, topping the charts – so much that we are no longer able to efficiently perform the mechanical functions necessary to win. We lose sight of the fact that those mechanical functions are necessary for the winning.

The definition of winning is different for everyone, of course. For me, winning is writing something that I believe effectively communicates to another, whether that’s a story or this piece you’re reading right now. Losing would be getting in my own way so much that this is a muddle and I’ve wasted your time.

There’s something else Venus says in that episode: ‘In sports, to be a champion, you have to have brutal honesty … you can’t hide from yourself. You can’t pretend. You can’t shut that part off … You have to tell yourself, I lost because of this. I lost because I was afraid. I lost because I choked.’

Tennis – and yoga, for that matter – brought me right up against myself before writing did. Even now, tennis helps me to hold myself accountable. If I take my eye off the ball, I lose the point. It happens every time.

That’s enough of the sports analogies now. I didn’t intend to write so much about tennis but that’s what happens when you’re passionate about something – the river picks you up and carries you along. I love being a tennis fan. I love that Venus and Serena are people I know about, people who inspire me. I love that watching a point by Carlos will brighten my day. I love that tennis marries intense creativity with intense physicality. And it’s fun. Writing is all of those things to me too.

Thanks for reading.

Love,

Sophie

While I haven’t written an issue of The Sunshine Society for a few weeks, I have been posting on Substack! Head to my Notes to see my videos on writing mindset, or go to the playlist on YouTube if you prefer.

What I’m reading

Dianarama by Andy Webb

A Forbidden Alchemy by Stacey McEwan

Being Carlos Alcaraz by Mark Hodgkinson

The Soulmate by Sally Hepworth (audiobook)

Practical Magick: Ancient Tradition and Modern Practice by Mitch Horowitz (audiobook)

[Yes, I always read more than one book at a time.]

What I’m listening to

The Hardest Thing, the new album by Catherine Britt – you can read my review of it here

Dear Sunshiners,

While my novels tend to have a group activity at their core – a book club in Fairvale, a swimming circle in Shelly Bay, a yoga class in Orange Blossom House, and so on – only one of the books has led to my life imitating my art.

When I was writing Weekends with the Sunshine Gardening Society, which is set in and around Noosa Heads in Queensland, I was not only reading a lot of books about the native flora of the Sunshine Coast – including one called Weeds of the Sunshine Coast – I was also thinking about doing some volunteer work in my local council area in Sydney but wondering what I could do on weekends, as everything seemed to be weekday-only, and I work full time.

My friend Chris, who is a book editor and published author, lives in the same suburb and she was volunteering for the council, doing Bushcare, which is pretty much what it sounds like. That year, she asked if I’d like to join her on National Tree Planting Day, and we planted some trees near Taronga Zoo. While there, I discovered that some of the Bushcare groups work on weekends. There was one on the last Sunday of each month, for three hours, on a block overlooking Sirius Cove (those who have read Art Hour at the Duchess Hotel will recognise Sirius Cove).

I joined that group. The other people there were the supervisor – employed by the council – and Ruth, who lived nearby. She’d worked the block for many years and never had anyone else regular commit over that time. I was about to become that person.

That first session, I was introduced to weeding. Specifically, weeding out the invasive species and leaving native weeds and plants. Learning to tell the difference between the invasive ‘Trad’ - Tradescantia fluminensis, the most common weed on the block (and in other places too) – and the native Commelina cyanea was, I quickly realised, quite a skill. They look very similar. The only main difference can be seen when both are in flower: Trad has white flowers, Commelina has blue. Also, Trad gives easily when you pull it while Commelina resists. As it should: we needed Commelina to replace the Trad, as prescribed in the Bradley method of bush regeneration, which states that invasive species should be replaced by native plants, as the invasive species won’t return to spots where natives grow.

After the second session I asked Ruth if she’d like to do some extra weeding in between official Bushcare gatherings. For one thing, there was a lot of Trad and in order to make headway on the bush regen, we needed to increase our pace of removal. For another: I loved weeding. LOVED IT. Still do. It’s incredibly satisfying.

Ruth said yes and I got approval from the council for us to be there in between Bushcare sessions.

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Sometime later I asked Chris – who also enjoys weeding – why she thought we both enjoyed it so much. ‘You’re editing nature,’ she said. As we are both editors, this made more sense than anything I could have come up with.

Yes, I’m editing nature. I’m also learning to really see things. When I’m in that patch of bush, sometimes sorting very carefully between natives and non-natives so I don’t pull out the wrong thing, I have to pay close attention and also ‘look back’ – that is, after my first go-through, I deliberately look away then look back and I will always find something I missed the first time. That too is like editing a manuscript.

What Bushcare has really taught me, though, is how to value something I once overlooked or, worse, thought wasn’t appealing. Raised on ideals of English gardens in a country that has imported many pretty bushes and trees and plants, with their prettier flowers, I thought native plants were ugly. While the colour of a Bottlebrush is lovely, what sort of flower has that shape? And is an Acacia anything to write home about? Or a Banksia – other than inspiring May Gibbs’s best villains?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Over the three years of working our little bush block, I have watched as our removal of invasive species has allowed the native grasses Dianella and Lomandra to flourish, covering the ground where before there was only Trad. We have planted Acacias and Grevilleas. We are watching the birds come back, because these native plants exist partly to create an ecosystem that supports birds and insects. And which supports us, because we live here.

I’ve also watched myself start to love these plants I once thought ugly, simply because they didn’t conform to what I had been trained to find acceptable. Being on this block, retraining my eye and, therefore, my brain to see beauty where before I saw nothing at all of merit, has helped me as a writer too. There are stories I used to think were the most pleasing, the most acceptable, because they were created outside of Australia. That’s what I’d been trained to think, at school, by the media.

When I wrote Fairvale it was suggested by one editor that I change some Australia-specific details to make it more acceptable to overseas readers – as it was to be published in the UK too – and I refused. Instinctually I knew it was wrong to change the Australianness to make the book more ‘appealing’ (a completely subjective assessment, of course). That suggestion recurred with subsequent novels. I’ve never changed any such details. But I don’t think I was ever quite sure of it until I learnt to love native plants and recognised that the Australian ecosystem in my novels was just as it should be.

Yes, I still need to pull out my own weeds – over and over again, because as I well know, the Trad never completely goes away – and those weeds include overthinking, unreasonable self-doubt (some self-doubt is normal and, indeed, necessary but too much of it is crippling) as well as a belief that I don’t have a right to write. That belief – which I had for decades – was the result of weeds called Tall Poppy Syndrome and Cultural Cringe, and one particularly invasive species called Cultural Imperialism from the Northern Hemisphere. I recognise these weeds now and I am completely bloodless about pulling them out.

So it is that I see the whole forest of what I’m creating – which is mine alone to know – and the trees that make it up: these stories, these worlds, that I pull from the ether and mould into book form. I also see the weeds that grow in that forest and remain diligent in yanking them out.

It’s very satisfying, that weeding. I recommend you try it. You don’t need as much strength as you think you do, or as much time. You just need to make a decision that the weeds have to go, then learn to not confuse them with the native growth that needs to stay, also learn to forgive yourself if you accidentally pull out something that really should have stayed, and keep yanking. Time can pass quite pleasantly this way, and your world – our world – will be made more beautiful as a result.

In other news … my first book in braille!

There are different ways to make books accessible so that everyone can read them. One of those ways is by embossing a book in braille – although only 5 per cent of all books are created in an accessible format, meaning many books are not available for tactile readers.

Braille House is a not-for-profit organisation that began operations in the late nineteenth century, with the establishment of the Queensland Braille Writing Association. Now they have a collection of over 8000 braille and Moon books, thanks to the efforts of volunteers and supporters.

The motto of Braille House is ‘the world at your fingertips’ and they are strong believers in braille for one big reason – braille is about literacy as well as inclusion.

It is a huge honour that Braille House have embossed my latest novel, Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon, in braille at the request of a reader. And here’s a photo of the resulting book! I’m still marvelling that this is possible, and thank Braille House for making it so.

Thank you to you, too, reader of The Sunshine Society! When I wrote my first issue of this I had no idea what I’d do with it. I have more of a clue now. And that’s thanks to you showing up to read it, so I feel like I’m actually writing to someone. I very much appreciate you being here. See you in 2026.

Love,

Sophie

What I’m listening to

Recently I interviewed Melbourne musical artists Tom Nethersole and Kye Arnot about their Christmas song ‘Holiday Spirit’, and that’s available on my Sunburnt Country Music platforms. During the interview I mentioned that I was going to make a Christmas playlist built around the song – and I did that! You can listen to it on Spotify and Apple Music. I’ve been listening to it a lot.

What I’m reading

The editorial report on my next novel, currently titled The Frock Shop and due for publication in August next year. I’ll be spending the Christmas-New Year period on the next draft. This novel has a different structure to the others – there are vignettes woven through the main narrative – and I’ve loved trying something new.

Dear Sunshiners,

It’s been almost a month since I last wrote a post here. I didn’t mean to leave it for so long, but I did have a novel to finish writing (now handed in and awaiting the structural edit report) and I was away for my ‘day job’ three weekends out of the four just passed. Which is the main reason why I haven’t written here – the Sunshine Society writing happens on weekends, and when the weekend isn’t a weekend, the writing is hard to come by!

However, I’m fond of believing that things happen in their own time, and while I had several subjects in mind to write about, the perfect subject presented itself at about 6.15 a.m. on Tuesday this week.

I’ve previously mentioned my yoga teacher, Shiva Rea, and her influence on my creative practice. She lives in Los Angeles and travels regularly to teach. She also teaches live on Zoom several times a week – often even when she’s in other countries - and at this time of the year, with daylight saving in New South Wales, class starts at 5 a.m. my time and I get up for it. On Tuesday morning there was a separate gathering after it, called ‘Firekeepers’, for a small group of us, and in it Shiva asked me if I’d like to say anything (this is not a forced activity – if I’d said ‘no’ she wouldn’t have minded). What I said was unplanned, and it was to do with how what she teaches has, over the years, given me permission to free my mind along with my body, and how I wouldn’t be writing books without it.

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I’ve written elsewhere about dancing freeform through the streets of a coastal town with Shiva, and how I long ago lost self-consciousness about such activities. Which, in turn, helped me lose self-consciousness about putting writing out into the world. And then making content for social media – which felt by far the biggest challenge, as I never wanted to make videos or anything like that … and will now do so at the drop of a hat! (As evidence: the Publishing Boot Camp series I’ve been posting in Notes here on Substack. You can also find it on my YouTube channel, TikTok and Instagram, all with the @sophiegreenbooks handle.)

The fact that I felt I needed permission to free anything at all is no doubt because of how girls and women are socialised, in large part. As an eldest daughter, those binds feel even tighter. (Taylor Swift was identified as an exemplar of eldest daughter syndrome well before she released her song ‘Eldest Daughter’ this year, and as one myself let’s just say the song does the job.)

When I first started practising yoga, it was in the Iyengar tradition, which is known for being rigid but I’ve actually found it freeing, in that its structural foundations are so solid that I could go into any class, anywhere in the world – and have – and feel safe. But when I started practising with Shiva’s DVDs, in the early 2000s, I knew something different was afoot. I resisted it at first – her work seemed to be venturing into territory I didn’t even know I was allowed to explore. Then I met her, and realised she was perhaps the wildest mystic I had ever encountered, while also being anchored in the earth like she has roots that go back centuries. She is still all of that. She is also the woman who, by example, by leadership, through her generosity of sharing wisdom and experience, helped me give myself permission to be free and also gave me the tools for it.

When Shiva teaches her Rhythm & Flow classes, in which dance is the key component, she exhorts us to ‘Be free, be free, be free’ as she is beaming, her arms to the sky, her feet moving and hips shaking and all of it a revolution in and of itself in a world where so much movement of girls and women is constrained and proscribed. That incantation burrowed into me, at a certain point. Now I remind myself of it when I feel the contraction of those eldest-daughter ways, the ones that make me inherently cautious, fearing a wrong step, not wanting to upset any apple carts.

Telling her about this in the Firekeepers group is the least I could do to acknowledge it. What I could have added was that on the mat, as she teaches, my heart has cracked open and let out muck I didn’t even know I was holding onto. That I have laughed and cried my way through practice, that her way of sequencing postures has made me realise that creativity can be accessed through the body, because body and mind are the same (and the mind is not the same thing as the brain). That my understanding of the world and the universe has changed – wholly for the better – because of her. How do you really ever thank someone like that? The least I can do is show up at 5 a.m.

I didn’t intend to write about any of this. I thought I’d come up with something nice about how there are no perfect places for writing a novel, or another subject related to writing. And this issue of The Sunshine Society is about writing, in that I wouldn’t be conjuring stories without learning first to be free. Mainly, though, this issue is both the result and evidence of what happens when I have given myself permission to be free for so long that I now regularly do something else Shiva taught me to do: step into the river and see where it takes me.

There is something else Shiva says in those Rhythm & Flow practices – not often, maybe once a year. Usually she is standing, arms at her side, palms up. ‘Open your heart into vast fields of light,’ she will say, her voice soft, at just the right moment in the practice to ensure that we can feel it. We can sense those vast fields of light expanding in front of us. From us to the space around us, to the people we know, to the world at large. The light expands because we offer it freely, and for it to keep expanding it requires a commitment to that freedom. Such a commitment that we no longer even think about whether we have permission to exercise it. We have become who we were always meant to be.

It’s in that freedom that I write fiction, for all the pushing and pulling that can go on with a novel as it’s taking shape. Other writers come to their stories in other ways, of course, but this is how I come to mine. Stepping into those vast fields of light, and hopefully taking you with me.

Love,

Sophie

What I’m reading

Courtney Cho’s Substack

I found on the manifestation side of TikTok (it’s a whole thing – I won’t go into it here, but once you’re on that side of TikTok there are many videos that are served to you). While I love her videos, her writing is what really bonded me to her. She has this ability to seem like she’s writing stream of consciousness when she’s actually structuring everything so tightly and writing it in such a compelling fashion that it flows beautifully, all while delivering a tonne of information. And she has these phrases that pop up which are so concise and elegant and often funny that they stop you in your tracks.

What I’m listening to

Paper Cuts, the new album by Lyn Bowtell

Lyn has one of the most glorious voices on the planet, she’s a wonderful songwriter and she’s also at the heart of the Australian country music community, as the director of the Academy of Country Music. I interviewed her about this album and made no attempt to hide my admiration of her. I never do. She’s a treasure, and this album is evidence of it.

Dear Sunshiners,

A little while ago I posted a video on TikTok (then reposted it on Instagram and YouTube) that had a strong response. The video was about how no matter how long a writer has been writing and how many books they have published, they don’t ever feel like they know what they’re doing. And that’s a good thing.

I was speaking from experience. Currently I’m on the home straight for the writing of my eighth novel, which will be published next year. It’s number eight of this type of book but I’ve written other books (not telling!) and I also write regularly on Sunburnt Country Music. In other words, I’ve done a lot of writing. And I have a lot of moments when I think, That’s it! You’re an idiot! You don’t know what you are doing! And other moments when I write something and think, How did that happen?

Partly I believe it’s because I regularly feel like a channel for a story, not a writer of it, so it seems as though the story somewhat writes itself and I’m just the person witnessing it, which means I have no control over it whatsoever. Another part of it is that I genuinely feel – more than think – that I really don’t know what I’m doing, despite evidence to the contrary.

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These feelings will be exacerbated when I receive the structural editing report and, as I’ve reported elsewhere, need to take some paracetamol and have a good, hard look at my life choices while I sob quietly into a cup of tea. Because there’s nothing else more guaranteed to make a writer feel like a failure/idiot/complete neophyte than a structural edit.

Yet I also know that feeling like this is a good thing. I do not ever want to reach the stage where I think I know what I’m doing. This may be because I have long subscribed to the concept of ‘beginner mind’ – that we must approach each venture as if we are a beginner, no matter how much knowledge we have. Over decades of yoga practice, I have had beginner mind each time I get on a mat. It has stopped me becoming lazy in the practice, and also makes things eternally interesting. So it is with writing. If I approach each new manuscript with beginner mind, I start it believing – nay, knowing – that I don’t know much at all. That keeps my perspective fresh and my skills sharp … and also sets me up to think I don’t know what I’m doing.

This is not a state of being I wish to change, even as it can be uncomfortable. Discomfort is an inescapable part of practising yoga, of writing a novel, of doing anything worth doing over a long period of time. The discomfort is part of what drives us on. We want to get past it. We want to find the sweet spot where we are cruising along, even if we suspect a pothole is ahead. That’s okay. Potholes can be navigated.

Am I mixing metaphors? Probably. It’s very late at night and I’m writing this newsletter to you because I haven’t done one in a while, due to work commitments and writing the new novel. But I wanted to write this post before too much time had elapsed, because I do appreciate you subscribing to The Sunshine Society and reading what I write here. Thank you for doing so. And if you are in Sydney, the Sunshine Coast or Canberra, I have some events coming up (details below) in case you’d like to see me waffle on in person.

Love,

Sophie

Events

Sydney: Friday 31 October, 6 p.m. at Harry Hartog Mosman – this is a event, I’m doing the Q&A with her, for her wonderful new book The Lucky Sisters. Tickets are free – book here.

Sunshine Coast: Sunday 9 November – Fiction Festival. Rachael and I will be there signing most of the day, and doing an in-conversation at 11 a.m.

Canberra: Wednesday 19 November, 6 p.m. – The Book Cow in Kingston. I’ll be there solo to talk about Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon. Tickets are free, bookings are essential and can be made here.

Dear Sunshiners,

Years ago, when I was doing my yoga teacher training, one of the teachers who came to talk to us about something (I can’t remember what) said that she had this attitude about students coming to class: ‘Whoever shows up, it’s perfect’.

I have kept that in mind ever since, for both yoga classes and author events, because it’s so easy to focus on who isn’t there – that negativity bias we all have – and forget to honour the people who are there.

There are country music artists I know who have big careers now who started out playing to the bar staff of each venue they went to, and because of how their careers have turned out I am confident that they had the attitude that the bar staff were the perfect audience.

When I started doing events as an author, in 2017, for The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club, I already had fifteen years of teaching yoga behind me and the attitude was ingrained. In some classes there were thirty students; in some there were three. If I had done anything different for the three than for the thirty – other than adapt the class as needed – that would have meant there was something wrong with me, not with them.

That doesn’t mean, however, that at every single author event I remembered that ‘whoever shows up, it’s perfect’ – and that’s because the stakes were different. I wasn’t worried for myself so much as for the booksellers and publishers involved. I still remember one event at Harry Hartog Narellan, for The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle, where I was chatting to a woman before the start time and she told me she was meeting her book club in the café next door. She then went off to the book club, and I started talking to the two people who had shown up for the event. And I mean talking to them – not at them – because the space was small and it seemed ridiculous to ‘give a talk’.

A few minutes later the book club members walked in, having decided to come to see me rather than hold their meeting. So the event had to change to take in the newcomers. I wasn’t having a conversation with two people – now I was back to giving a talk – and if I hadn’t had those years of teaching yoga, the shift might have rattled me. Instead, I knew it was perfect and went about things accordingly.

Having a particular attitude towards events doesn’t mean that I have always taken them in my stride, that I’ve never been nervous. I’ve been nervous teaching yoga, and doing events, and while this has lessened with time I can still find myself enervated, realising that I’m nervous without consciously having stirred up nerves. I know that the nerves mean I care: teaching a class, I care that the students leave feeling better than they did at the start, and it’s pretty much the same for author events.

For my recent events for Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon there have been quite a few people attending, which has been lovely. But that doesn’t mean there will always be quite a few people attending. Indeed, the last time I wrote to you I announced an event at Harry Hartog Mosman, with Anthony Sharwood. That event has been cancelled because of low RSVPs. It was meant to be today (28 September) at 2 p.m.

I considered whether or not I should mention this – it could be seen to be embarrassing, right, that the event had to be cancelled? Except I had to laugh when I was told because I’m pretty sure I’ve said something about Sydney events being tough when talking to on our podcast. And I also had to take the attitude that whoever showed up, it was perfect – which meant it was perfect that the event was cancelled.

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So it has proved. As I write this, I have a cold. I haven’t had one for a long time. Usually I manage to stay lurgy free. But this one has been on the way for a while and I’ve been fending it off. Last week, after a big amount of stressful stuff that had lasted weeks was over, I gave the cold permission to come on in (I realise this sounds odd, but mind-body connection is real and we probably all have experiences of colds or other ills arriving at the exact moment we go on holiday or there’s some kind of lull). I have some travel coming up and I wanted it out of the way before then. And in it came.

If I were doing that event today, I wouldn’t be at full strength. My voice might have given out. My energy levels would certainly not have been normal. The event would most likely have been less entertaining than it could have been. Which means it was perfect that it was cancelled. It also gives me some time and energy back to write my next novel, which does need a lot of my attention at the moment.

I could feel irritated, or abashed, or concerned about this cancelled event. There were indeed some moments of one of those (you’ll have to guess which). But I let the emotion go fairly quickly. Partly because I also take the attitude that whoever shows up to read my books, it’s perfect. And it’s the reading of the books that I care about most. Not the events, as nice as they can be. I write books for them to be read, and events aren’t even on my mind.

Thank you to each and every one of you who shows up for my characters and their stories. You are perfect.

Love,

Sophie

What I’m reading

The Lucky Sisters by Rachael Johns

I received an advance reading copy of Rachael’s new book and I was curious not just because it’s Rachael’s new book and OF COURSE I want to read it, but because I was one of her research subjects for it! The twin sisters of the title are adopted, as am I, so Rach had some questions for me. The novel is heartfelt and engrossing and – my highest compliment – easy to read. She’s done it again! And I feel so lucky to be able to not only read her books but talk to her about them.

What I’m listening to

Endemic Intelligence in Multiple Dimensions by Brad Cox

Brad Cox is one of Australia’s most interesting musical artists – and he just happens to be a country music artist. I interviewed him for his last album, Acres, and was very pleased to be offered the chance to chat to him about this latest album, which is an epic in the very best way. Cox has one of the best voices in the land – in the world – and he’s a mesmerising live performer. He also told me that his preferred method of warming up for a show using to be ‘four schooners and four durries’, so that will give you a sense of him! But this is also the man who can write poignant love stories, as in ‘Dance with the Moon’, and be prepared to show us who he is and what he wants, as on ‘Wait on the Day’, and get you all fired up with ‘Everything I’ve Got’. My interview will be out soon, over at Sunburnt Country Music.

Dear Sunshiners,

It has been a few weeks since I wrote to you and that’s because, as you know, I have a new novel out and while I haven’t spent all that time doing things related to the novel, the juggle of full-time work with book promotion, producing two podcasts and writing the next novel has meant that there hasn’t been much time to write The Sunshine Society!

I like to write these missives on a theme, but the other day I thought I’d actually just write about what I’m up to … which then turned into a theme of sorts.

What I’m up to is travelling to Melbourne this coming week to talk to the National Writers Conference of the Emerging Writers Festival, held at The Wheeler Centre. This is so I can give a talk on how to write a pitch, something I do online each year for the EWF Inside the Publishing House programme and which I did in person, in Melbourne, for the first time last year as well. I’ll be doing this in my capacity as a publisher (of non-fiction and now some fiction), although the way I speak on the subject is informed by things I’ve learned being an author.

I have tweaked the content of this talk from year to year but it’s been mostly the same: practical in nature, trying to give writers information so they know why it’s a good idea to write a pitch for their manuscript even if they don’t need one right away, and also what they should think about when they’re writing it.

This year, however, I have realised that I can approach it differently – I don’t have to stick to what has worked in the past just because it’s useful (or I’m told it’s useful). So I took a step back and looked at it from the perspective of a writer who doesn’t know much about the publishing industry, who is looking not just for information about the industry and how to write a pitch but who may need to connect to the whole concept of pitching differently. Because a lot of writers don’t want to write a pitch. For some it’s because they think they shouldn’t have to; for others it’s because the writing of it seems so different to writing their novel or children’s book or memoir that they think it’s beyond them. I used to think that too – but as a publisher who has to pitch to her colleagues and an author who has to pitch to her publisher, I have come to embrace the writing of the pitch as an opportunity to understand the story I’m writing (or wanting to publish) and connect with someone who may want to read it.

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So what I landed on is this: the pitch is the writer’s way of communicating their story and ideas to someone else at a point at which they do not know the writer and do not know that they may have something great for them. I am going to encourage writers to think of it as their story trying to make a new friend. Their characters wouldn’t just bowl up to a stranger and insist that they spend time with the story. The stranger needs to have reasons to do so. They need to figure out if they can trust the writer and their story before they commit time to them.

Asking someone to read your book is like asking them to be friends with your story. The potential friend - reader - needs to know why your story is worth spending time with. They need to know why they can trust you and your characters, or your content if you’re writing non-fiction. The pitch is the way to begin that relationship. The manuscript is the way to confirm to the new friend that they have made the right decision.

I hope that if writers start to think of it that way, they’ll feel that they are inside the process and that it hasn’t been imposed on them. And I do mean feel: if we can feel, rather than think, that we’re working towards making that connection, it’s for the good of writer, story and reader. Because, after all, what we’re doing by telling stories is communicating.

This will likely be of interest only to the writers who are reading this – non-writers, thank you for bearing with it!

On to other news: Harry Hartog Mosman has invited me to do an event on the afternoon of Sunday 28 September, and when they asked if there was a local writer I’d like to do it with, I made the perhaps unconventional suggestion of Anthony Sharwood. Unconventional because he writes non-fiction, and they might have expected me to choose a novelist. Also unconventional because I’ve published four of his non-fiction books, so this will not be a straightforward author-and-author conversation!

I chose Anthony because we always have great conversations that range across writing and history and creativity and the Snowy Mountains (three of the books I’ve published are his ‘alpine trilogy’: From Snow to Ash, The Brumby Wars and Kosciuszko). He is erudite and funny and passionate, and therefore I know that if you don’t know of him, you’ll enjoy finding out!

We’re going to talk about writing, of course; about the author-publisher relationship and how we work together throughout his writing and editorial process; about how we find stories and how we know which stories are going to work.

At least, I think that’s what we’ll talk about. Anything may happen. We’d love to see you there and whether you’re a writer or a reader, please bring your questions about anything you like to do with books and publishing, because between us we can probably cover it.

Date: Sunday 28 September

Time: 2 p.m.

Address: 888 Military Road, Mosman NSW 2088

Cost: Tickets are free - registration is advised:

https://events.humanitix.com/sophie-green-in-conversation-with-anthony-sharwood

Until next time, and with love,

Sophie

Dear Sunshiners,

Thank you so much to everyone who has read or intends to read my new novel, Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon - it is always somewhat surreal when a book is released and the characters make their way into the world and readers form their own relationships with them! There have been some lovely reviews from Bookstagrammers taking part in an online tour organised by the book’s publicist, Laura Benson, and I am now resting easier knowing the story has had a soft landing.

While fitting in interviews and other things - including three hours of podcast recording with today (for three different episodes of Dear Rach & Soph, including one about Seaside Salon) - and also writing my next novel, I have to admit I struggled to come up with something new to write about for The Sunshine Society! So I thought I’d share with you this piece I wrote for an Irish magazine in early 2023, for the UK release of The Bellbird River Country Choir. It was written well before Art Hour at the Duchess Hotel found its current form but those of you who have read that novel will recognise a location from the opening chapter in this piece. The brief was to write about ‘Life in Sydney’ and I decided to write about how I write in Sydney, in part. I’m also including some photos I’ve taken of locations mentioned in the piece. The header image is of Taylors Bay, Mosman. Below is one of my writing locations: the ferry home. And at the bottom you’ll see the angophoras on the bush track around Bradleys Head, also in Mosman.

Also, I have some events coming up and I’d love to see you if you can make it!

I have some events coming up and would love to see you there!

CENTRAL COAST: Thursday 21 August, 10.30 a.m at Erina Library. Register here.

NEWCASTLE: Thursday 21 August, 6 p.m. at Newcastle City Library. Register here.

SINGLETON: Friday 22 August, 11.30 a.m. at Singleton Library. Register here.

LIVERPOOL: Tuesday 26 August, 6 p.m. at Liverpool Library. Register here.

PERTH: Sunday 19 October, 3.30 p.m. at the Festival of Fiction, Joondalup. Details here.

SUNSHINE COAST: Sunday 9 November at the Fiction Festival, details tbc.

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Some people write at desks; some may have a shed or use a desk in a library. When I first started writing I had to fit it in around full-time work – and I still do – so the logical thing was to write while commuting. Luckily for me, that commute involved a ferry.

I live in a harbourside suburb of Sydney called Mosman. The ferry from Mosman Bay takes just over 20 minutes to Circular Quay in the city. In those 20 minutes at either end of the day I can write quite a bit, and when I need to stop and think about something I can lift my head and maybe I’ll see Pinchgut – also known as Fort Denison – or Maccullum Pool at Cremorne Point, or the naval base at Garden Island or the arc of Farm Cove and the Sydney Botanic Gardens as we come closer to the city. The calm waters of the inner harbour mean that my lap can be a stable writing table, and the seating arrangements such that I am never jammed up next to anyone else.

Mosman is the suburb I grew up in, although during my childhood I took for granted its stunning main beach, Balmoral. Swimming laps up and down Balmoral and observing clusters of swimmers chatting on the sand gave me the inspiration for my second novel, The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle.

Balmoral is the best known of the several harbour beaches in this area. Some of them look across to the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, yet most days it’s not unusual to find hardly a soul on them.

These beaches are tucked next to walking trails that wind through the different bushlands in Mosman, some of them classified as National Parks, some as Sydney Harbour Trust, some as council land. There’s no distinction to tell you where you are, though, as you stroll past towering angophoras and small native bushes that at various times of the year may carry delicate flowers, or wattle trees that from wintertime sport bright yellow puffs that herald the coming warmer months.

On these tracks it’s not unusual to find lizards sunning themselves on flat rocks in the afternoon sun, or brush turkeys plodding ahead of you, so used to humans that they usually don’t bother moving out of your way. There are rainbow lorikeets raucously chattering to each other as they pick at flowers and cockatoos ruthlessly shredding branches off trees, seemingly just for the fun of it.

One of these walks goes past Taylors Bay, with a beach that’s only accessible at low tide, by walking over rocks, and where once I waded into very shallow water only to have something – still unidentified – grab at my heel but not leave a mark.

If you follow that same walk you will eventually come to Clifton Gardens, with its netted swimming area and its naval buildings formed of sandstone. Hideouts and battlements are cut into nearby Middle and Georges Heads, looking mainly towards Sydney Heads, where guns were placed and men watched the water; these are relics from world wars and a reminder that Australia is vulnerable to attack by sea.

Clifton Gardens is on Chowder Bay, which still serves the navy and it’s not unusual to see a large grey ship moored next to restaurants and the hole-in-the-wall coffee shop.

I’ve walked these tracks for years but they took on a different significance during the pandemic lockdowns, when no one could travel further than the limits of their local council area. It’s to the tracks I would take while I was working from home and also trying to write my third novel, Thursdays at Orange Blossom House and, as it turned out, the fourth, The Bellbird River Country Choir.

Often those walks were the demarcation between ‘day job’ and writing, because I wasn’t commuting on the ferry and, therefore, had to find a different way to work. Some days I would set off with a narrative problem to solve, and it usually was solved somewhere amongst those trees and birds and lizards, or churning up and down the water at Balmoral.

In a different part of the suburb the walking track takes you past Curlew Camp, where, in the late nineteenth century, Australian impressionist painters Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and their friends set up tents and painted the water and bush of Sirius Cove.

If I stand at Curlew Camp I can look across the cove to a little patch of bush, which is where you’ll find me two Sundays a month, putting my (gloved) hands into the dirt, planting native grasses and pulling up weeds, as part of the council’s Bushcare programme. As much as Mosman’s ferry helps me write, so now does this ritual of being close to the earth, with nothing else to do for hours but care for the land that has cared for me, to watch out for a butcher bird that swoops to pick up the worms revealed where weeds are removed, and spiders that have made their homes under plants. Stories come to me here, as they have on the ferry, in the water and on the bush tracks.

Thank you for reading.

Love,

Sophie

Dear Sunshiners,

This is the last newsletter before the release of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon on 30 July and if you are one of the readers who have preordered it … THANK YOU! It is now my highest-preorders-ever title, and given that Australia doesn’t really have a preorder culture, that’s even more amazing. Preorders are popular with publishers and booksellers – of course, authors like them too, but I know from the being-a-publisher part of my life that there’s increasing focus on them.

So if you have preordered it, or you’re planning to read it at some stage, what can you expect? Probably more than I expected, given I had not planned to write a novel for this year! Some stories – some characters – just insist on being told, though, and as I mentioned in my previous newsletter, this story muscled its way in.

The main characters of the novel are Trudy, the widowed owner of a hairdressing salon in Terrigal on the Central Coast of New South Wales; hairdresser Evie, who works with her; Josie, her apprentice, and Anna, who brings her mother to the salon. The novel takes place in 1986 and big flicks and layers are in fashion for hairstyles, so there are mentions of Krystle Carrington from the TV show Dynasty and of Diana, Princess of Wales (two of the best proponents of the flick and the layer, respectively).

There are various other characters, of course, because the main characters have lives and communities and families. I never really know where their stories come from and also know from messages I’ve received about previous novels that there are parallels to real lives I could never have guessed. Even before this one was released, there was a parallel: one of the attendees of the Readers Retreat in Scarborough, WA, earlier this year told me that her mother had a hairdressing salon in Terrigal in the 1980s and it turned out to be in the same street I’ve located Trudy’s salon – and not only that, another attendee we were talking to knew the salon very well because her parents had a business in that same street! Whether or not you believe in coincidences, that’s the first time I’ve learnt about such synchronicity before a book was published. In that moment I felt like Trudy was squeezing my shoulder and saying, ‘See? I knew my story had to be told.’

I stopped getting in the way of my characters and their stories a long time ago. What gets in their way now is time – the time I have to devote to them. There are so many characters and stories bubbling away in my mind, or wherever they live, that there’s some competition for attention and the ones who are the most demanding tend to take the reins, as Trudy and her gang have here.

There are four love stories in this novel: lost love (Trudy), unrequited love (Evie), first love (Josie) and love on the rocks (Anna). This is not a romance novel, so I can’t promise you neat endings – I don’t do those, because life isn’t neat. Life is messy and wonderful and heartbreaking and confusing and glorious and devastating and never, ever neat. Neither is love.

I don’t usually do quotes from my novels but here’s a passage from quite deep into it. No names, no spoilers, but at the time I wrote these lines it felt like the gears of the novel all clicked into place and I knew that this contains the essence of everything I was trying to express through these four love stories.

She knew this was coming. On some level, this has always been coming … in and out of each other’s lives, him showing up, her not seeing it for what it was. Love. That’s what he’s talking about. That’s what he’s offering her.

That could be why, standing on this Terrigal street, with no wind and no cars and hardly any birds, it feels as if the world tilts on its axis and she has the choice to tilt with it or resist.

She closes her eyes, feels the air over her skin. Notices how seconds feel like minutes then hours, how time is changing shape and she is zooming backward and forward and it all feels more certain than it ever has.

I’m now working on next year’s novel but looking forward to talking about Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon at some events in the near to middle future – details below. And I’ll see you on the other side of publication.

Love,

Sophie

Did you know? Dear Rach & Soph is now on Substack! All the past episodes are in one place – including the one where Rach and I discuss the fact that we’re both the products of affairs. That was our second episode. Wild times!

What I’m reading

The Ladies Road Guide to Utter Ruin by Alison Goodman

I loved Goodman’s first Regency novel featuring sisters Lady Augusta and Lady Julia Colebrook, The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies, and I am so enjoying this second in the series. I’m not usually a Regency reader, so you don’t have to be partial to or knowledgeable of Regency novels to enjoy it – not when the writing is this assured and the characters this compelling! You also don’t need to have read the first one.

What I’m listening to

Why, my Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon playlists, of course! There’s a 1980s one packed with hits from the same time as the novel is set, available on Spotify and YouTube. There’s also one comprised of contemporary Australian artists in the country music genre and thereabouts, made to match the emotional flow of the novel and also available on Spotify and YouTube.

EVENTS

I have some events coming up and would love to see you there!

CENTRAL COAST: Thursday 21 August, 10.30 a.m at Erina Library. Tickets available here.

NEWCASTLE: Thursday 21 August, 6 p.m. at Newcastle City Library. Ticket link not yet available.

SINGLETON: Friday 22 August, 11.30 a.m. at Singleton Library. Tickets available here.

LIVERPOOL: Tuesday 26 August, 6 p.m. at Liverpool Library. Tickets available here.

PERTH: Sunday 19 October, 3.30 p.m. at the Festival of Fiction, Joondalup. Details here.

SUNSHINE COAST: Sunday 9 November at the Fiction Festival, details tbc.

There are a few other things to add, in Sydney, and one with a certain Rachael Johns … Details are not yet finalised, though.

Dear Sunshiners,

There are ten days until the release of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon, my latest novel. It is set mainly in Terrigal on the Central Coast of New South Wales, in 1986, and is centred around – no surprises here! – the Seaside Salon, where hairdresser Trudy smokes and combs and cuts her way through the days, bereft after the loss of her husband two years before. Joining her in the salon is hairdresser Evie, who has a young son, Billy, and an amicable relationship with his father, and apprentice Josie, who is enjoying her freedom from parental restrictions and her new sense of self. The fourth main character is Anna, who visits the salon with her mother but is not a client at first.

There are four love stories in the novel: lost love, unrequited love, first love and love on the rocks. And I had absolutely no plans to write a novel for publication this year, but these characters had other ideas as they came to me out of the ether and decided now was the right time to meet you all.

[Dawn at Terrigal Beach, July 2025 - photo by me]

The reason they could emerge was because I had, unwittingly, been preparing for them. As I mention at the start of the acknowledgements in the back of the book, I was watching the web comedy series Hot Looks Salon (part of the Neon Girls universe) by American comedian Casey Dressler. Originally it was all set in the 1980s, and I’m calling the series Hot Looks Salon because at the time I started watching it Casey didn’t have many other strands to her stories – now she has a whole phalanx of characters. The one I latched onto was Donna, the hairdresser at Hot Looks Salon. Although Casey doesn’t deploy this line much any more, towards the start, when Donna was about to use hairspray she’d say (to the imaginary client – Casey plays all the characters and can only do one at a time!), ‘Honey, cigarette down.’

Cigarette down.

That was the line that sparked my imagination (pun possibly intended) while my brain was idle for a few moments one day. Not long afterwards a chain-smoking hairdresser called Trudy popped into my mind. Then followed, within the space of no more than fifteen minutes, the other characters, the setting and the love stories. That last aspect surprised me, as while there can be some love stories in my novels, they are not a focus. But I let my characters boss me around and this is what they were telling me this time.

The other 1980s element was that I had the album Girlhood by Queensland artist Hayley Marsten on high rotation. I had interviewed Hayley about it for Sunburnt Country Music, my other creative enterprise, and knew it was influenced by 80s music. It’s also, as far as I’m concerned, a modern classic and the only album I can think of that has the experience of being a girl and woman covered so acutely and poignantly. Other artists have songs about it; Hayley made a whole album, and I listen to it still.

Once I started to flesh out the novel, the last influence appeared: the song ‘Black Sand’ by Matt Joe Gow and Kerryn Fields, from their album I Remember You, and especially the lines ‘I want to come back to you … I’ll meet you at the waves’, although the whole song had an impact. ‘Black Sand’ is about loss and memory, and there is a fair bit of both in Seaside Salon.

The novel was originally called Monday Mornings at the Summertime Salon and while we’ve kept the alliterative form of that title, it became clear by the time I came to the editorial phase that I was limiting myself with the Monday mornings thing and when I put title options to readers on social media, including The Little Salon by the Sea and Lessons in Love (or Love Lessons) at the Summertime Salon, two people separately suggested Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon and that salon name felt better. Huge thanks to Jenny Kessell and Nicole Sanderson for this final piece of the title puzzle.

With the novel release imminent, and that scene now set, I have two playlists for you just to set it a little further! The first is a 1980s playlist featuring songs from no later than the time the novel is set, and you can find that on Spotify or YouTube. The second is a playlist of contemporary songs, including ‘Black Sand’ and several from Girlhood, all by artists I know from my work on Sunburnt Country Music, and that’s also available on Spotify and YouTube.

Both playlists are in a custom order – I love putting thought into such things, as music is (as you may have guessed) hugely important to me, and making a playlist is a creative process just as writing a book is. The 1980s playlist is organised so that it musically ebbs and flows. The contemporary playlist is organised to match the emotional/story flow of the novel. However, by all means hit the shuffle button if you prefer! And I’m letting you know about them now so you can start to get the 1980s vibe going, if you wish, or have a sense of the emotional flow of the novel, if you wish. Mostly it’s because after creating them and testing them and reordering them for the past few weeks, there was no point in me hanging on to them any more. Just like the characters, they belong in the world. I make things in order to let them go and I hope that you enjoy these playlist-creations and maybe, in the contemporary one, find some new artists to embrace.

Love,

Sophie

Dear Sunshiners,

Art Hour at the Duchess Hotel is the novel that took the longest to come to life and the only one that had a title – or part thereof – before I started writing it.

When the idea for this story arose in the months after the publication of The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club in 2017, I was calling it ‘Duchess Hotel’. It was always to be a story set in a grand hotel and I knew the hotel was called Duchess. There was a character called Joan, and one called Kirrily, and some other lead characters who either disappeared or became a minor character (William, the manager of the hotel in the final incarnation).

I mentioned the idea to my publisher and she liked the sound of it, but there was another idea, about ladies who swim together, and that was more appealing. Which is why my second novel was The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle and not Duchess Hotel.

The idea wouldn’t leave me, though. Before my fourth novel, The Bellbird River Country Choir, became a reality I mentioned the Duchess to my literary agent and started thinking about where the hotel would be set. I looked at Tewantin on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, because I really wanted to set a novel in that area (and later did, in Weekends with the Sunshine Gardening Society). Then my mother – who was with me when the original idea for Duchess came about in a hotel in Melbourne – suggested Delgany in Portsea, on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. Once a grand hotel, it’s now private residences. I researched it online and as soon as I saw a photo I knew it was the Duchess.

[The Mornington Peninsula - photo from iStock]

I started writing the manuscript several years ago, while I was in between novels, and the main characters were Joan, Kirrily, Joan’s best friend Genevieve (who is a minor character in the final version) and Frances. Frances was in the original manuscript of Fairvale – of which very little survives, and Frances was not amongst the survivors. She kept following me around, though, and finally I realised she belonged in the Duchess Hotel.

Someone else who belonged in the Duchess Hotel was Shane, the bartender at the hotel, who is not a main character in the novel but he’s the lead secondary character, crossing each main character’s story. Shane popped up in two earlier novel ideas that didn’t go anywhere but I couldn’t forget him. Then I realised he belonged with Frances.

That first attempt at the story reached 20 000 words or so before I had to go and write something else, and it was dark. Heavy. I wanted to explore the nature of Joan and Genevieve’s friendship and how it would change after a tragedy drove them apart. But ultimately I knew that took Joan away from how I’d originally conceived of her: a woman trying to find her way back to herself after decades of dismay.

Still, my publisher considered that partial manuscript in two consecutive years until we agreed it was too dark, although she, like me, was partial to the idea of a story set in a hotel.

I wanted the novel to be called High Tea at the Duchess Hotel because I really liked the sound of it, but I hadn’t quite considered how to make high tea hold a novel together until I began making notes and realised it was limited. My publisher knew that already and suggested that another device was needed.

Around the time of the original Duchess idea I had also come up with a story about artists. It was inspired by Curlew Camp, an artists camp on Sirius Cove in Sydney Harbour in the late nineteenth century that was home to Arthur Streeton, amongst others. I live about fifteen minutes’ walk from the site of Curlew Camp and know it well.

I started to think about a novel with a parallel storyline: one set in the 1890s in and around the camp, and one present day. I mentioned the idea to my publisher but she wasn’t keen on the historical aspect. It didn’t go any further after that.

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Except it did. Sitting in the back of my brain, it came forth to form the missing piece of the Duchess Hotel puzzle that enabled the story to come together. Joan lives near Curlew Camp. She is an artist who has not lifted a paintbrush in decades. And the reason why – which you’ll know if you’ve read the novel – is my only nod to the original dark manuscript and its storyline.

So it became Art Hour at the Duchess Hotel. That didn’t mean the cover was going to be all paint splodges and brushes and a canvas. We still wanted to have flowers, and I had already written the trees and bushes and colours of the Mornington Peninsula into the story, after spending a few hours there observing how the greens were different to those near home. How the light was different. Joan’s artist’s eye would notice such things, so I had to. Thus the flowers on the cover better suit the peninsula. And there’s a bird, of course.

Listen to the first chapter of Art Hour at the Duchess Hotel

Some people see the cover colour as pink but it’s purple, and it’s the purple we didn’t use for The Bellbird River Country Choir. I didn’t forget it, so when the publisher asked if I had a colour in mind I plucked out the purple Bellbird concept and asked if we could use that hue.

The B format (smaller than the original C) has a paler colour on it – the first time one of the B formats has changed from the original – and you can compare them below.

All of my books’ covers were designed by Christa Moffitt of Christabella Designs and I love them all – each new one is my favourite, then it becomes an old one and I love them all equally. If you have a favourite please let me know in the comments.

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Thank you for coming with me ‘behind the cover’ for each book.

Love,

Sophie

What I’m reading

When the Going Was Good by Graydon Carter

Graydon Carter was the editor of Vanity Fair magazine for many years and as a longtime VF reader (since my school years) I had to read this book, and consider it a worthy companion to Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries (Carter succeeded Brown at the magazine). It is charming and insightful and funny. Carter was a hands-on editor, going over every word that went into the magazine, so there’s quite a lot in this book for those interested in editorial process, as well as writing, for he’s obviously a writer too. I particularly like this quote: ‘An editor’s job is … also about being appreciative of how difficult it is to be a writer. Much more challenging, certainly, than being an editor - editors never have to stare down a blank piece of paper.’

What I’m listening to

The playlists I’m creating for my next novel, Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon, which will be released on 30 July. I have one of 1980s hits and one of contemporary Australian country music tracks that are companions to the storylines. I want to make sure the order of the songs works, hence me listening to the playlists.

(In case you’re new to The Sunshine Society, I also have a whole country music life at – the Substack is new but my website has existed in one form or another since 2011. SCM is also on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.)

A warm-hearted novel about friendship, fresh starts and finding yourself from Top Ten bestselling author Sophie Green

Mornington Peninsula, 1999. All Joan ever wanted was to be a painter, but after thirty-five years of marriage, she finds she is simply a wife, mother and good citizen. On a whim, she escapes to the grand Duchess Hotel to find herself.

At the Duchess, Frances drops by most days to escape her daughter, Alison, who seems intent on putting her in a home, while hotel maid Kirrily is struggling to balance work, family and her dreams.

When Joan decides to pick up a brush and start painting again, she inspires Frances and Kirrily - and, eventually, Alison - to join her. Over canvas, conversation and creativity the women learn to hold onto their dreams and live life on their own terms.

'A great book club pick [for] fans of Elizabeth Strout's Lucy by the Sea, Meg Bignell's The Angry Women's Choir and Joanna Nell's Mrs Winterbottom Takes a Gap Year' BOOKS+PUBLISHING

'Deftly crafted by an author who knows how to conjure her characters, where to put them and which stories they will tell to evince a swathe of emotions in each of us' LIVING ARTS CANBERRA

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Dear Sunshiners,

Weekends with the Sunshine Gardening Society was published in 2023 and created almost entirely out of my love for Noosa Heads in Queensland, which is pretty much my second home. The first photo of me at Noosa was taken when I was eight months old. Throughout my childhood, always around Easter time, my parents would pack me and my brother into the car and drive us north from Sydney, stopping overnight in Tenterfield or Glen Innes – they would only ever take the New England Highway, declaring the ‘coast road’ (the Pacific Highway) too dangerous. My father would make up stories about the names of towns; they were early dad jokes.

The second night was always spent at the Pink Poodle Motel in Surfers Paradise. For me the Pink Poodle meant books. If I was well behaved on the long drive Mum would give me books once we reached Surfers. Usually I’d read on the way up, somehow not carsick in the back seat with my head down, so by Surfers I was in need of new material. Not that there was as much time to read it on the drive to Noosa from Surfers on that third day of travel.

Noosa wove a spell on me in my childhood that has yet to break. I’ve returned so many times as an adult, once going out of my way from Maroochydore airport, ostensibly heading for Gympie for an event that night, making sure I had an hour to be at Main Beach. An hour was all I needed to soak up what I like to call Noosa Magic.

Once I decided to write a novel with gardening at its centre, I was very set on it being on the Sunshine Coast. Writing it in 2022, with the pandemic not yet quite behind us, I knew I, and readers, needed a place of light. It had to be Noosa.

[Main Beach, Noosa Heads - photo by me, as are all the photos here]

When I started writing I vaguely knew of the environmental activism that had taken place around Noosa, and that the author Nancy Cato had been involved. (For a long time the bar on the street side of the Sofitel Hotel – Sheraton as it used to be – was called Cato’s. I still call it Cato’s.) Once I started researching the flora of the area, kicking off with Noosa’s Native Plants (fifth edition), I realised just how extensive that activism was and how it had preserved so much of the native bush, and also prevented Noosa’s Main Beach strip from becoming a row of high-rise hotels.

So I had, it seemed, picked the perfect location for a story about a group of women who found connection with each other and themselves by caring for the land in this part of Australia. Cynthia, Lorraine, Elizabeth and Kathy are the main characters, and there’s a secondary character called Shirl who represents all those activists – so many of them women with creative practices – who fought to preserve Noosa.

This story began life, while I was staying in Noosa many years before, as ‘The Treehouse Near the Water’s Edge’. Cynthia was in it, as was her daughter, Odette, and ex-husband, Pat. So was Von, who is named for my childhood babysitter and piano teacher – a grand, talented woman – and she appears in the finished novel, just as Odette and Pat do. Their story as it was in that original plan forms only part of the finished novel.

Listen to the first chapter of Weekends with the Sunshine Gardening Society

When I realised the ‘Treehouse’ title wouldn’t work for what was now quite a different story, I came up with something else. I gave the publisher two choices. Weekends with the Sunshine Gardening Society or Weekends with the Sunrise Gardening Society. Both were named for beaches, Sunshine and Sunrise. The publisher chose Sunshine. The title of the book went into the contract, the first time this had happened

While writing I sent the publisher a list of the flowers that are in Elizabeth’s garden, which is where the society ladies all work together at first. Pink hibiscus wasn’t on that list. But I knew the cover was likely to be yellow, and also knew pink would pop against yellow, so when the design came back with pink hibiscus on it I added them to Elizabeth’s garden. Sometimes art has to imitate art. Also on the cover are wide bay boronia, which were on the list, and that’s also one of the types of flowers I drew for the chapter openers. For this novel I wanted to draw native flowers and have them punctuate the text. You can see an example of the drawings below.

This cover was my favourite of them all when I first saw it. The way the colours work with each other, the little galah down the bottom, it all captured the feelings I was trying to convey in the story: warmth and beauty and joy.

Writing this novel was easy when I was in it but came at a hard time. My father fell ill and was permanently changed. Going from work to the hospital, then to various facilities after he left hospital, trying to help my mother manage bureaucracy and just figure out what was going on half the time, I have no idea how I managed to write that book. All I can say is that Noosa Magic pulled me through. I wanted to be back there in my imagination. I wanted my hands in the dirt.

Literally, as it turned out. During this time I started volunteering to do bushcare for my local council. Not for research but because there’s an environmental activist legacy in my home suburb too: the Bradley method of bushcare, which has a fleeting mention in the novel, was developed by two Mosman sisters. The Mosman Parks & Bushland Association continues their work, just as the Noosa Parks Association carries on the work of Nancy Cato and others. Each month, still, I turn up with gloves on, spray some tick repellent around my neck and head and wrists, and start pulling out weeds. I love it. And I’ve made friends through it – life imitating art, for the first time for me.

The little bush patch where we work is across the water from a spot called Curlew Camp. Curlew Camp features in the opening chapter of the novel that succeeded Sunshine Gardening – Art Hour at the Duchess Hotel. Art imitating life. So the cycle, and the journey of art and life, continues.

Love,

Sophie

No ‘what I’m reading and listening to’ this week – instead, ‘what I’m giving away’!

Art Hour at the Duchess Hotel has been released in a B format – smaller than the original C format – and I have three copies to give away to the first three people to leave a comment on this post on Substack. The comment can be ‘Duchess Hotel’ or ‘Art Hour’ – just something that refers to the title! I’ll then contact those three to ask for postal details.

Sunshine Gardening is the tale of four women: Cynthia, Lorraine, Kathy and Elizabeth. Here's some more information about it …

A tender, warm-hearted story of female friendship, community and new beginnings from the beloved Sophie Green, the Top Ten bestselling author of The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle and The Bellbird River Country Choir.

Noosa Heads, 1987: Newly divorced Cynthia has returned to her hometown from Los Angeles to reconnect with her 19-year-old daughter, who is pregnant and determined not to listen to her mother's advice. Cynthia's former best friend, Lorraine, has been stuck mowing lawns as part of a business she shares with her husband - his dream, not hers. When Cynthia convinces Lorraine to join the local Sunshine Gardening Society, they meet young widow Elizabeth, and rootless, heartbroken Kathy.

The four women soon discover the society is much more than an opportunity to chat about flowers. Rather, it offers them the chance to lend a helping hand to people whose lives need a bit of care and attention, right along with their gardens.

Between pulling up weeds and planting natives, the women learn from each other that some roots go deep, and others shallow; that seeds can lie dormant for a long time before they spring to life, and that careful tending is the key to lives and friendships that reach their full potential.

'An enjoyable and heartwarming read' ABC GARDENING AUSTRALIA MAGAZINE

'If you love gardening, then you're going to love Weekends with the Sunshine Gardening Society. This is a compassionately written story full of joy and hope'YOUR TIME MAGAZINE

'Sophie Green's stories are a comfort as warm as the Noosa sun and the embrace of a true friend' LIVING ARTS CANBERRA

'Atmospheric and incredibly descriptive writing . . . A must-read for anyone looking for a heartwarming story filled with great music and small-town charm'7WEEKENDER

'Wonderful . . . A pleasure to read, offering a new perspective on life' GYMPIE TODAY

'A gentle story that left me feeling warm' THAT'S LIFE!

Dear Sunshiners,

There’s a part of the New England Highway in New South Wales, driving north, after you leave Murrurundi and cross the Great Dividing Range, where a bend in the road seems to open up the entire world. The vista is so vast, the colours so varied, the sky so impressive, that it’s as if the human eye can’t take in the scope of it.

I’ve driven that road many times – too many to count, and most of them heading to the Tamworth Country Music Festival – and always wait for that spot. Something in my chest cracks and it’s not a sense of coming home, although Tamworth is familiar now, so much as being in awe of the landscape. I live near the sea but I love our inland vistas.

A little while on from that bend in the road there’s a fork in it, of sorts, where a driver can go straight on to Wallabadah then Tamworth, or swerve left to take the Kamilaroi Highway to Quirindi.

The second time I went to TCMF – my first time as a spectator, because the actual first time had been as a performer – I stayed in Quirindi, thinking it was closer to Tamworth than it is. That was because I hadn’t looked closely enough at the scale on the map. Late at night, returning from shows, it was, in truth, a long, dark drive through Werris Creek back down the highway to Quirindi.

There was something about that town, though, that stayed with me. Long enough that, years later, I decided to set a novel near it. Not in it, because the name is so distinctive and the town so small that I couldn’t get away with pretending to know it well enough to set a story there. And while I wanted to write a novel that honoured the whole region I didn’t want to set the story in Tamworth because a small town suited my purposes better.

By that time, too, I had been a country music journalist (of the amateur variety) long enough that I knew too many people in the industry to write a story set in our country music capital (although I’ve had people suggest I write a country music romance novel!).

The tale of how I came to be so enmeshed in Australian country music – and still am – starts with that first visit to TCMF as a performer, takes a turn through an illness that almost killed me and travels on through how writing about music and interviewing artists have led directly to me writing novels. Another story for another time, and I’ve been threatening that a fair bit in these newsletters!

So no setting my novel in Tamworth or Quirindi but I wanted to write about the region, which meant I needed to make up a town. And that town’s name is in the title of my fourth novel, The Bellbird River Country Choir.

Listen to the first chapter of the audiobook

The town was not called Bellbird River at first. The original manuscript was titled ‘The Country Choir’ and there was a different town name in the delivered draft, and through the first editorial stages, but by the time we reached the copy edit the word came down: the town name would not do.

There followed a process of me, the publisher and the in-house editor tossing names back and forth, with me sending bird and flower names and having them all rejected. I had ‘bellbird’ on my list but didn’t suggest it because I wasn’t sure, then the editor suggested ‘Bellbird River’, and it seemed a case of two tributaries meeting (just to extend the idea).

The fictional Bellbird River is a town between Tamworth and Quirindi, close to a turnoff to Wallabadah (there is such a road in Quirindi, so I fudged things a little).

There are gum leaves and flowers on the cover, and a magpie – magpies are mentioned within, as are other birds. Also within the pages are line drawings that I drew. One for each part of the novel. I just felt like I wanted to draw them but also said to the publisher that if they were no good, please tell me. No one said they weren’t (and that emboldened me to draw flowers for the next novel!). Here are some of the sketches that made it into the book.

As for that big vista and the New England sky, I worked that into an early chapter. On page 45 it is, and we are in Janine’s point of view:

Hanging up the apron, she steps out into the soft light of evening and looks up. She loves these New England skies on summer nights. The blue is so intense and the sky is so big that she can feel as though she lives inside a blue marble.

Sometimes she and her father sit on the back steps and watch the light changing. They’ve been doing it since she was a kid and she’s never lost interest. Her brother used to join them, but then he got sick. Not in the body. That would have been easier.

[Tamworth seen from Oxley Lookout - photo from iStock]

I wanted one of the characters to have that experience of the sky. It couldn’t be town matriarch Victoria, whose view is on street level, or her cousin, Gabrielle, who barged her way into a point of view in the story when she was meant to just be Vicky’s cousin. It couldn’t be Debbie, whose life has become small and she’s not yet ready to open it up to a view as big as those Liverpool Plains. Or Alex, who has left bustling Sydney for a quieter life. It had to be Janine, the baker who also paints, the artist who sees colours and shapes and who also thinks of herself as being so small in a big world.

The cover of this novel could have been lilac – that was one of the final two options. We went with green. I didn’t forget that lilac, though, and it would turn up on Art Hour at the Duchess Hotel, which we’ll get to in a future post.

The green is right, although ironic for this drought-struck town in the middle of rocks and dirt, with a dry creek bed. It’s right because I wanted these characters to have new shoots in their lives, with music as the force behind the change, as it has been for me. While this novel isn’t set in Tamworth it’s very much my way of honouring all that the town has done for me. There’s no doubt in my mind that you wouldn’t be reading these words – or my novels – without it.

Love,

Sophie

What I’m reading

In Spite of You by Patrick Lenton

This rom-com – or com-rom, as Patrick called it when Rachael Johns and I interviewed him for our podcast, Dear Rach & Soph – is so funny and sweet and spicy and delicious that I never wanted it to end. And end it has, because I finished it before we recorded the episode, but I’m filing it under ‘What I’m reading’, present tense, because I wanted to mention it to you. It will be published in August and our episode with Patrick will be released around the same time.

What I’m listening to

My own Sunburnt Country Music June 2025 new releases playlist. I make playlists of new Australian country music tracks and try to add to them as songs are released, although I sometimes fall short. I’m also falling short on recording my new releases podcast episodes, as I haven’t had time to prepare one for a while, but I hope to make one very soon, which means listening to the new releases and choosing the songs I want to cover. My other podcast episodes – which are interviews – continue and if you’re curious about them you can see them on YouTube or find the Sunburnt Country Music podcast in the usual places.

[Cover photo of a bellbird from iStock]

A warm-hearted story of fresh beginnings, unexpected friendships and the sustaining power of love and community, from the Top Ten bestselling author of The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle and Thursdays at Orange Blossom House.

Bellbird River, 1998: Teacher and single mum Alex is newly arrived in the small NSW country town of Bellbird River after escaping the city in search of a change of pace and the chance to reconnect with her young daughter. Across town, well-known matriarch Victoria and her globe-trotting, opera-singing cousin Gabrielle find themselves at a crossroads in their personal and professional lives, while local baker Janine and newcomer to the district Debbie are each secretly dealing with the consequences of painful pasts. With its dusty streets, lone pub and iron-lace verandahs, Bellbird River could just be a pit stop on the road to somewhere else. But their town holds some secrets and surprises - and it has a heart: the Bellbird River Country Choir.

Amid the melodies and camaraderie of the choir, each of the women will find the courage to leave the past behind. And together, they'll discover that friends are much closer to home than they'd ever realised.

'This is a warm treat of a novel, filled with great music and small-town charm' The Australian
'Full of great characters and topical themes, this is a very engaging and inspiring novel' Canberra Weekly
'Charming and nostalgic ... Fans of Tricia Stringer and Joanna Nell will devour The Bellbird River Country Choir. It's a warm treat' Better Reading
'An easy read packed with song, friendship, country warmth [and] surprises' Courier Mail

Dear Sunshiners,

If the title of my 2019 novel The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle took a while to emerge, it seemed quick in comparison to the title for Thursdays at Orange Blossom House, published in 2021 at a time when several states and one territory were in the hardest of lockdowns.

I’d agreed with my publisher to write a book with a yoga class at its centre, and I wanted to set it in and around Cairns in Far North Queensland, thinking of the tropical environment and the cane fields and how I could weave those into a story. The first chapter of the novel would be inspired by the opening lines of the Brad Butcher song ‘Well Dressed Man’: ‘There’s that sweet memory again/Burning rows of sugar cane/Under a sunset you just don’t see any more’.

As I started writing during the national lockdown in 2020 I made plans to visit Cairns as soon as the border between Queensland and New South Wales opened. It fluttered open in the middle of the year, and I started looking at flights, then it shut again. It would not reopen for any length of time until well past the manuscript’s due date, so I was not able to visit. Instead I relied on research and my memories of time spent in Port Douglas and Cairns several years before.

While I was writing we also thought about a title. There was a variant of ‘The Rainforest Yoga Class’ and I said I didn’t want the word ‘yoga’ in it. The reason yoga was in the novel was because I’ve been practising it since 1993 and teaching since 2002, yet despite my deep immersion in the practice I felt instinctively that putting the word in the title would imply that the whole novel was about yoga, whereas really the class was a device to bring the three main characters – Grace Maud, Dorothy and Patricia – together.

Listen to the first chapter of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House

My working title was ‘Treehouse’ as I’d had an earlier idea called ‘The Treehouse by the Water’s Edge’ (this later formed the basis of Weekends with the Sunshine Gardening Society). So we tried to work treehouse into the title. Fail.

Then I thought about focusing on the day of the week the characters went to class: a Thursday. They also had coffee together from time to time so ‘Thursday Ladies Coffee Group’ was suggested. It just didn’t feel right.

By this stage I knew there were likely to be flowers on the cover, as there had been on the previous two novels, The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club and The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle. There were flowers in the text – how could there not be, when the story was set in the tropics? I’d found a website that listed flora native to the area by both scientific and common names, and I’d chosen the orange blossom orchid (seen below) as the favourite flower of the yoga teacher, Sandrine. There was also mention of Burdekin plums, so I suggested those and the orchid for the cover. [Photo below by Lakeview_images, from iStock.]

Then it struck me: orange blossom orchid sounded like something. ‘Thursdays’ plus ‘orange blossom orchid’ really sounded like something. If I called Sandrine’s school Orange Blossom Orchid House, maybe we were there. So I suggested Thursdays at Orange Blossom Orchid House, even though I knew it was a little unwieldy.

The publisher, Fiona Hazard, came back with Thursdays at Orange Blossom House and straightaway I knew her instinct to chop out ‘orchid’ was right.

This is the only one of my covers that features a flower that has a direct reference to the title, and how lovely it is that the connection could be made. You’ll also see orange lilies and tropical foliage on it, standing out against the soft salmon pink. Or maybe it’s not salmon pink. What do you think?

Regardless of what we call the colour, Christa Moffitt of Christabella Designs made another beautiful cover, as she has with every book. Perhaps the colour was inspired by the sunsets seen in that part of the world, one of which you can see in the image below, of Trinity Beach just north of Cairns. [Photo by Michael Xiao, from iStock.]

Thursdays at Orange Blossom House did not have the start the previous novels had. There were no bookshop visits or events on the cards. There wasn’t much I could do by way of publicity. Everything was tricky in August 2021. But I trusted that the story would find its way to the people who needed and wanted it, and so it proved. Partly thanks, no doubt, to Whileaway Books in Port Douglas, who have supported all of my novels. Huge thanks to them, and to the readers who found the novel in 2021.

Thank you for reading about cover number three! Next week we’ll be in the fictional town of Bellbird River.

Love,

Sophie

What I’m reading

This Dream Will Devour Us by Emma Clancey

This debut YA fantasy from a Sydney medical student is clever and compelling and highly readable. Featuring main character Nora, it’s about power and inequity and magic and celebrity, and the things we’re prepared to do for those we love. Out now in Australia and next year in the USA.

What I’m listening to

Switch On by Sweet Talk

This new album from Melbourne six-piece Sweet Talk is a whole country-soul-groove vibe. Sweet Talk are festival favourites, and this collection of songs shows why. Several of the band’s members have been playing together for years and these songs are tight, and layered, and highly entertaining.

[Cover photo taken from Kuranda Scenic Railway by Jina Ihm, from iStock.]

The novel has three main characters and is set in and around Cairns in FNQ. You can read more about it below. The audiobook is narrated by Edwina Wren and is available in all the usual places.

From the author of beloved Top Ten bestsellers The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club and The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle comes a delightful novel about friendship, love and finding yourself.

Far North Queensland, 1993: At 74, former cane farmer Grace Maud is feeling her age, and her isolation, and thinks the best of life may be behind her. Elsewhere in town, high school teacher Patricia has given up on her dreams of travel and adventure and has moved back home to look after her ageing parents, while cafe owner Dorothy is struggling to accept that she may never have the baby she and her husband so desperately want. Each woman has an unspoken need: reconnection. And that's how they find themselves at Orange Blossom House, surrounded by perfumed rainforest, being cajoled and encouraged by their yoga teacher, the lively Sandrine. Together, they will find courage and strength - and discover that life has much more to offer than they ever expected.

Set amid the lush beauty of tropical Queensland, Thursdays at Orange Blossom House is a heartwarming story of friendship and family, of chances missed and taken, and the eternal power of love.

Dear Sunshiners,

Before The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle was released in August 2019, the general feeling was that it would likely not sell as many copies as my first novel, The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club, published in 2017. That’s just the way it goes a lot of the time – the first novel is released with a splash, and it’s harder for the second novel to get the same attention from media and booksellers and readers. (The media interest issue remains a challenge for most novelists as there aren’t that many ‘hooks’ for radio, TV and so on.)

Or perhaps the author has ‘second album syndrome’, as I usually call it because it’s seen so often in the music industry. The syndrome is seen in films as well. The creator of that first work tends to put a lot of themselves and their life story into it, which means they’re out of material for a second novel/album/film.

I did not have this problem because there was very little of me in Fairvale. It probably helped that I’d already written a few romance novels (under a completely different name and they’re now unavailable) so if I was trying to use my novels as catharsis, it was already done. Having said that, the last Theresa POV chapter in Shelly Bay contains my direct experience of a very serious illness that had me in ICU and an induced coma in July 2011 (it took me months to recover from it and ultimately led to me writing – but that’s a story for another day).

That chapter is the only part of any novel that is taken directly from my life, and I wrote it into the story because I honestly thought I’d likely never have another opportunity and I wanted to record it. Given the pre-release prognostications for Shelly Bay, I couldn’t presume I’d release another novel after it.

Happily, Shelly Bay was a hit. At the time I wouldn’t have used that word. Tall Poppy Syndrome – another subject for another newsletter – remains active in Australia and to claim success is to risk opprobrium. Now, though, I realise that to not claim it is to ignore the many readers who helped make it a hit. And who have stayed with me and my stories and characters since (THANK YOU!).

Listen to the first chapter of The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle here

It’s a form of reverse egotism to say ‘oh no, not me, I didn’t do anything good’, because it’s basically akin to holding up a sign saying ‘please tell me I’m great’. I got over that. It would have been a hurdle to my writing eventually. You can’t write convincingly when you’re asking others to make you feel better about yourself – characters, stories, readers need writers to take charge from the start, to ensure that you can just dive into the novel and not worry about anything else, otherwise we’re wasting your time. (Maybe that’s a subject for another newsletter too!)

Back to Shelly Bay. The original manuscript was called ‘The Manly Beach Story’. This is Manly Beach in Sydney.

[Photo from iStock, credit Vince Barnes]

I grew up near Manly and live near it now, and a while ago lived across the road from North Steyne for a year. There are three ‘beaches’ on the one long strip of sand that runs between North Head and Freshwater Beach: Manly, North Steyne and Queenscliff. Each has its own surf lifesaving club. For those not in Sydney, it’s not unusual to have more than one beach on one strip of sand: South and North Curl Curl, for example; Collaroy, Narrabeen and North Narrabeen.

For many years I have swum in the ocean, and while I live near a harbour beach, Balmoral, and swim laps up and down there, untroubled by waves but wary of stingers (hence why I only swim at low tide at certain times of the year), I learnt about swells and how to swim around them when I was young, and I was a bodyboarder for a few years too.

Swimming is a coastal Sydney pastime. In my suburb, half of the residents seem to be in the water by 7 a.m. on any given day, fewer of them in winter but there are still people swimming then. It was at Balmoral that I first had the idea to write a story about a group of ladies swimming together. But I knew that a harbour beach lacked the built-in drama of swimming in the ocean, so I set the story in Manly and had the characters swimming, as many real-life people do, between Manly and Shelly Beach (Shelly can be seen in the cover photo), which is a small, protected spot beloved by divers.

On the way these swimmers pass the whimsically named Fairy Bower, which I mention mainly so I can include this glorious photo of the sculpture at the tiny Fairy Bower pool.

[Photo from iStock, credit Jason Fairbairn]

My publisher, Rebecca, and I spent a while trying to make ‘Manly’ work in the title for this novel. We simply could not. You can try it yourself: say it out loud in a phrase. It’s not a word that flows. You get stuck on the ‘n’. It wasn’t going to be right and as much as I didn’t want to give up my real-world location, I also wanted a name that would be more lyrical, and therefore more of an open hand to readers. Those sorts of things are important to me: beats in a sentence, the way a word sounds and not just how it looks. Language is communication and connection, and as someone who prizes manners, I always want to be well-mannered to readers. That means the books, starting with the titles, need to issue an invitation.

As Shelly Beach was already in the story, the solution was there, but it took us a while to arrive at it. Once we did I went back into the manuscript and the whole area became Shelly Bay. Manly Beach became Main Beach (named for Main Beach in Noosa Heads – which would later make several appearances in my 2023 novel Weekends with the Sunshine Gardening Society). Sydney disappeared and became ‘the city’.

After the book was released – and to this day – readers tell me their theories about where Shelly Bay is. The most common guess is Shelly Beach near Cronulla, in the Sutherland Shire of Sydney. I think only one person has guessed Manly. Maybe I hid it too well, but anyone who knows the area will recognise where the hospital is, and the Olympic pool, and the ferries that go to the city.

Once we had ‘Shelly Bay’, and we knew we wanted ‘swimming’, all that remained was a word to bring it all together, and ‘circle’ arose. The ‘ladies’ were a nod to the Fairvale Ladies Book Club. Again, at the time it seemed unlikely there would be another novel so I didn’t think I might be wedging myself into a style I’d have to continue (and which I didn’t anyway).

The cover pretty much took care of itself after that. Aquamarine for the water. Frangipani and hibiscus because there was no reason to not continue to have flowers. And some swimming paraphernalia. From memory it was very straightforward from a design point of view; as with Fairvale, arriving at the title was the tricky part.

Thanks, as ever, for your time and attention. Next week we’ll go to Far North Queensland and Thursdays at Orange Blossom House.

Love,

Sophie

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What I’m reading

The Path Through the Coojong Trees by Léonie Kelsall

Rachael Johns and I have interviewed Léonie for our podcast Dear Rach & Soph and I’ve so enjoyed reading this novel, Léonie’s eighth, which is out in July.

What I’m listening to

‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ by Fanny Lumsden

A cover of the smash-hit Gotye song, done in ARIA- and Golden Guitar-winner Fanny’s unique style. If you’ve never heard Fanny’s music before, use this as your entrée then seek out her back catalogue – she is a singular artist, documenting rural life and life in general in ways that are simultaneously playful and insightful and more besides.

[Cover photo of Shelly Beach from iStock, credit rmbarricarte]