The holidays are upon us, and so is the end of the year—and what a year. 2025 sure left its mark on our community, with attacks on our literature, our rights, and our selves, testing our resilience and our resolve. This newsletter features new ways to think about the coming year in a way that puts your well-being first and includes some thoughts from others about how they’ll do that this year.

• Kris Bryant will lead a writing session January 11th at 10amCTC/12pm ET.

News Roundup

By Cindy Rizzo

It’s time for our monthly look at what’s happening with book-related issues:

Here’s Some Data and a Study

In 2025, we saw more bans on Banned Books Week than in any recorded memory.

In a groundbreaking cross-organization collaboration, the American Library Association, Book Riot, Florida Freedom to Read Project, PEN America, and Texas Freedom to Read Project have come together to highlight trends in this year’s book censorship activity nationwide. Each group expresses deep concern over continued book bans and celebrates the successes brought by literary and library advocates on the ground. 

Among the trends highlighted in the group’s report are: 

• Deep undercounts of book bans by various organizations and acknowledgement as to why counting is imprecise and imperfect 

• Misuse of “weeding” in libraries to remove books deemed “inappropriate”

• The growing use of Artificial Intelligence to remove and restrict materials in public schools as a result of new state legislation 

• Policies and laws at the state and federal level facilitating widespread literary censorship

• Passage of several freedom to read laws at the state level, community-level wins in local school and library board races, and success in the judicial system

• By coming together, these organizations have provided as wide and deep a lens into the book censorship landscape as possible. Read the full piece here

Quiet/Soft censorship appears as a library worker choosing not to purchase materials for a collection out of concern that someone might not like them. Removing materials without justification or choosing not to pursue justification are among other acts of quiet/soft/self/ silent censorship. That’s not to mention those professionals who agree with the censorship and choose not to purchase or decide to remove those materials. Quiet/soft/self censorship happens both on the frontlines and in administration. We Need Diverse Books is collecting information on the soft censorship of diverse books across the US. Have you witnessed soft censorship in your community? Fill out their form here 

A new survey of 1,000 American adults (18+) who read romance reveals the genre’s impact on its readers:

• 54% say romance books give them a much-needed break from reality

• 42% of male romance readers and 20% of female romance readers report that they feel like they’re part of a community when reading romance.

• 41% say romance novels are an avenue to “me time” and self-care

• 33% report rethinking what they want in relationships after reading romance

• 31% admit romance novels made them want to spice up their own love lives

• 25% have been inspired to write their own stories after reading romance.

Let’s Get the Bad News Out of the Way

SCOTUS Disappoints Again: The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the Llano book ban case enables expanded government power to remove books, weakening First Amendment protections. Read here

Anti-LGBTQ Directive in TN: One hundred and eighty-one public libraries in Tennessee are reviewing their children’s collections after Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett (R) ordered them to remove books with LGBTQ themes or characters. (According to legal precedent, it is unconstitutional to remove books from a public library simply because the books include a character who identifies as LGBTQ.)

Don’t Say “Banned” Two library workers shared that this year’s Banned Books Week was rebranded as Freedom to Read Week in their institutions. In both cases, the decision to create displays and awareness around the "Freedom to Read" was done as a means of "toning down" the reality that books are being banned nationwide.

We Deserve Some Good News

• Brooklyn Public Library’s "Books Unbanned" program just reached ONE MILLION checkouts.

• Voters voted out pro-book-ban elected officials in Pennsylvania school boards, in the Cy-Fair ISD board in Texas, and a school board and county board of commissioners in VA..

• Missouri courts just killed the law that prosecuted school employees for providing "sexually explicit materials" to students and led to untold numbers of book bans

• U.S. District Court Chief Judge John J. McConnell ruled in favor of 21 state attorneys general suing Donald Trump over the dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and several other small federal agencies. This permanent injunction means that the Trump administration cannot do further harm to the IMLS.

• Even though Republicans in New Hampshire tried to override the (Republican governor’s veto on their book banning bill, they did not garner the support to revive the bill. The freedom to read continues in the state.

Finnian Burnett’s Ten Resolutions for World-Weary Writers

Hey besties. Listen. If you’re anything like me, you’re facing 2026 with less a renewed sense of hope and motivation and more of world-weary resignation, exhaustion, and despair. Like the universe said, “Happy New Year. The world is f*cked. Have a nice day.” It feels like that some days, like I’m tired, like I can’t remember why I’m doing this, like what is the point in continuing to put words to paper in the face of political upheaval, continued oppression of marginalized folks, and generative AI built on the stolen works of hard-working writers. It’s almost enough to make you want to quit.

Almost.

But the thing I keep coming back to is the idea that writing is one of the few places we can be fully ourselves. Our glorious, flawed, complicated selves. If you’re putting your words on paper, you’re sharing your voice. And your voice matters now more than ever. Your stories matter more than ever.

So do mine. It’s what keeps me coming back to the keyboard every day, even when I’m not feeling it. It’s what keeps me reflecting on what I’ve done and looking forward to what I might do next. And it’s why, instead of making the usual back-breaking list of New Year’s Resolutions, I’m working on a list of resolutions that allow me to cherish who I am, to embrace my creative self, and to lean into being proud of what I’ve accomplished even when it doesn’t jibe with what other people consider success.

Instead of writing a post cajoling writers to set word count goals and book goals, I’m sharing resolutions for people with saddened souls, for weary writers, for human beings who sometimes can’t write because they’re too busy crying.

Finnian Burnett’s Ten Resolutions for World-Weary Writers

1. Lean hard into your weirdness. Folks, we need your humanity more than ever. Give me your strange stories, your run-on sentences, your characters with odd quirks and eclectic hobbies.

2. Write what matters to you. No one else has your voice! Everything you’ve experienced in life, all the books you’ve read, the people you’ve loved, the things you’ve lost—it all adds up to how you tell your stories. Lean into that.

3. Flip off people who don’t get you. Taste is subjective. There will be people who hate your work. Those are not your people. Screw them. They can’t offer you anything.

4. Write for five minutes. Look, these goals of writing 1200 words a day or sitting down for an hour every day are absolutely fine if you have the time and energy to do it. But what about just sitting down for five minutes and letting some words flow.

5. Embrace suckiness. Write some bad stuff. Practice writing truly terrible sentences. Your crappy first drafts are part of the process and everything you write, good or otherwise, is part of what makes you a writer.

6. Celebrate the small stuff. I wrote 125 words the other day! Woot! Maybe a lot of people wouldn’t see that as a win, but last week was stressful and the fact that I was able to sit down and write 125 means that for at least a small period of time, I was tapping into my happy place and accessing my soul energy. I call that a win.

7. Gather some queerleaders. Yes, critique is fantastic. But have at least one person on your team. One person who will read your work and tell you what they love about it. One person who stares at you with admiration when you talk about your latest plot lines. Yes, critical feedback is important. But so is unbridled admiration. Find the people who can give it to you.

8. Treat rest like it’s sacred. Many years ago, I was lamenting to Karelia Stetz-Waters that I hadn’t written in months and was starting to fear I’d never write again. She reminded me that creativity needs to be nurtured and sometimes that means letting it go underground for a while so it can ripen and bloom. I’ve never forgotten that.

9. Stop comparing yourself to other writers. You have no idea what is going on in another person’s life, what privileges they may have had, what classes they were able to take, how supportive their families were. You are only responsible for your own writing path, not theirs.

10. Be a community. Share each other’s posts, stories, joys. Take time to stop and congratulate someone with a new release or commiserate when they post about a rejection. Recommend your friends to conference organizers or send submission links to your writing group. Be part of a team.

Friends, if you’re about to enter 2026 tired, unsure, and a little bit sad, please know you’re not alone. I’m there with you. But I’m still a writer and it’s still my job—maybe even my calling—to chronicle my experience of the times in which I live. I am a writer. You are a writer. And your words matter. They matter to your readers. They matter to me.

You deserve to take up space, yes, and you also deserve rest. Gentleness. Love.

Happy New Year.

Aisley shares her goals for the new year and tips for how readers can track the books they read.

You can follow Aisley @aisley_stark_industries on Instagram and @theonelineman on TikTok.

Tacie shares her plan to approach reading and reviewing sapphic books in a long-term, sustainable, and intentional way in 2026. How? Backlists!

You can follow Tacie @sterlingsapphicreads on Instagram.

Campaigns

Hi All, a quick SASS check-in because we are doing things and excited to do more things, while still doing the things that matter right now. 

SASS is officially 3 for 3 on community support campaigns as we close out 2025. After a strong showing with #SapphicsWithTheBanned, the community came together again last month to support Golden Crown Literary Society through #SWAG4GCLS. Together, SASS’ team raised $1,154. Huge shoutout to Kris Bryant for finishing 2nd overall in fundraising and helping drive real donor momentum. 

Rounding out the year is #SapphicBooksAreGifts, where authors are sharing tropes, teasers, and sapphic stories that make genuinely great gifts. We get to repost, amplify, and cheer on why these books matter to our community, now and always. We are looking ahead to the new year with a lot of energy and intention, and we are excited to partner with even more of you as we keep working together to protect, uplift, and support our community

—by Becks Quirk

Expanded Distribution of In Her Words: 20^th Century Lesbian Fiction

The documentary film, In Her Words: 20^th Century Lesbian Fiction, celebrates the writers who transformed lesbian storytelling across the 20^th century. Up until now, the film has only been available to view via public screening, film festival, library loan, or in an educational classroom setting.

Cheryl Pletcher, Marianne K. Martin, and Lisa Marie Evans are super excited to announce that beginning on December 20th, ANYONE within the United States and Italy will be able to rent the documentary on the Kinema platform. Assuming the Italian rollout goes well, they will be expanding access to many more international audiences in 2026.

Here’s more info about the film:

In Her Words: 20^th Century Lesbian Fiction is now officially on Kinema! You can host a screening or rent the film directly from Kinema. The film is currently available in the U.S. and Italy, with a worldwide rollout coming in 2026.

In Her Words: 20^th Century Lesbian Fiction celebrates the writers who transformed lesbian storytelling across the 20^th century. Narrated by LGBT historian Lillian Faderman, and featuring illuminating interviews with trailblazers such as Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Dorothy Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina), and Sarah Waters (Tipping the Velvet), the film traces a literary journey from the 1920s through the 1990s, charting the evolution of lesbian fiction alongside broader social and political change. Through rare archival footage and candid reflections, the film explores the triumphs, controversies, and cultural shifts that shaped generations of writers and readers. A moving celebration of visibility and voice, In Her Words honors the stories that helped countless readers see themselves, finally and fully, in print.

Learn more at www.inherwordsthefilm.com

Craft Tips: Getting Unstuck

It’s been a very challenging year and many of us have found it hard to write as a result. If you’re looking for motivation to get back into your writing groove, Reedsy recently ran a “Getting Unstuck” webinar that provides mindset and craft tips for anyone struggling to write. You can watch the recording here.

Action Item

Leaving a review does real, measurable work for a book. On Amazon and Walmart, reviews affect search visibility and recommendations, while on Goodreads they influence discovery, shelving, and reader trust. Reviews also matter on platforms like StoryGraph, BookBub, and indie bookstore sites. A few honest sentences help books stay findable, extend their life beyond launch, and connect stories with the readers who are already looking for them.

Marketing Resolutions for the New Year

Becks here with a few easy New Year’s resolutions you can actually keep. These are small, practical steps that quietly do a lot of work for you and kick off strong marketing tactics in the new year.

Start with your socials. Update your headlines to feature your most recent book or your next release. If someone clicks your profile, it should be immediately obvious what you wrote/review and where to go to learn more. 

While you are there, update your bios too. Then make sure that same bio is reflected on your website and across selling platforms. Consistency matters more than cleverness, and it saves readers from confusion. 

And yes, send the newsletter. Your readers want to hear from you. Again. Your. Readers. WANT. To. Hear. From. YOU. A New Year email does not need to be perfect. It just needs to exist.

You’ve got this!

Ten Ways to Increase Your Agency

The first time Driving by Starlight was submitted to publishers, all of them rejected it. But looking at the rejection notes, there was a common pattern that emerged. Almost all of them felt the characters didn’t have enough agency and the ending was too sad; in the YA genre, you couldn’t have a beloved character die by suicide. The message that would send was: When living under an oppressive regime, death is the only escape.

At first, I was annoyed. Having lived in Saudi Arabia myself, I didn’t understand what exactly a teenage girl was supposed to realistically do – topple the government? If Anne Frank were fictional, would she be expected to lead up the resistance to Hitler? (Apparently, yes, because this is what happens in almost all popular YA). But this is neither realistic nor sustainable, as it puts the burden of changing the system on those made most vulnerable by it. But writers must be agents of hope, and I wanted Leena to have an answer other than violent revolution.

So I rewrote the book, this time focusing on the characters’ agency. Just because you don’t have total autonomy doesn’t mean you don’t have agency. We, all of us, live in a society that places some constraints on our individual freedoms. There are at least three options when those constraints become intolerable:

1. Stay, and gain enough power to change the system

2. Leave, and go somewhere more amenable

3. Stay, and survive the system as best as you can

What does it mean to have high agency, even when you don’t have power? I broke it down into 5 things I try to do, but agency isn’t always about doing. So I’m also sharing 5 things I avoid doing because they decrease my agency.

5 ways to increase your agency

1. Storytelling: Art itself is an act of agency. Every system of oppression aims to take away access to two things – the means of production, and the means of communication. Your work, and your voice. Shout too loudly, and you’ll be silenced or removed, but the alternative to shouting isn’t silence. There’s a lot of room between the story you want to tell, and the story you’re allowed to tell. Although Driving by Starlight is a sapphic story, it had to be true to the culture of Saudi Arabia, where even the words for expressing queer love did not exist and most kinds of love were a crime. Moreover, the publisher insisted on having at least the whiff of heterosexual romance. I felt the story was important enough to tell that I complied… sort of. Driving by Starlight is exactly as heterosexual as the Netflix series The Untamed, which “has trodden the insanely thin line between what the Chinese government will allow in terms of its strict conservative anti-LGBT+ censorship laws and what people want to see happen.” Yeah, no homo here at all:

2. Making friends: I don’t mean networking or building influence or creating coalitions to take down the dystopian government. Or not just that. Most of my friends I’ve had for years. Who’s going to try to pull you back off a cliff even if they’re themselves bleeding to death? Make those friends. Be that friend.

3. Synthesizing information and building on ideas: Too often, people think the only way to have agency is to have their own ideas accepted wholesale by others. Unless that happens, they feel unheard, but they’re incapable of actually listening to anyone else. Listening actively on multiple levels allows you to see that maybe an idea isn’t succeeding as is, but with some refinement, clarification or added value, it could succeed.For instance, with Driving by Starlight, the key concept – a story about how the friendships between women are a sustaining force in an oppressive society – remained the same across four revisions.

4. Celebrating, Praising and Thanking: Gratitude recognizes the agency of others. Culture is what we reward or punish. Want to change the culture? Reward the behaviors that make a difference. Even just saying thank you, or recognizing what others do well is a powerful antidote to apathy and disempowerment. 

5. Understanding and brokering power: In both her novel, Girl, Woman, Other, and her substack, Bernadine Evaristo outlines the way those without power can accumulate it by forming a true sisterhood. In the seventies, women like Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker formed a group that transformed academia and fought for the rights of Black women in a hostile society. I was so inspired by this that I wrote a whole post on how a sisterhood can go beyond simple friendship into a transformative force. 

5 things that decrease your agency

1. Complaining and Catastrophising: If you’re stuck on all the ways the current situation sucks, or complaining about the most recent Bad Thing, or always wondering about what horrible secret meaning is in the latest thing your boss or parent or spouse said? Save it for therapy. Is the thing you’re going to do worth doing anyway? Then do it. If you’re going to stay, commit. Or leave.

2. Overcommitting: Don’t let your ambition exceed your capacity for execution. If you don’t protect your boundaries, people see how helpless you are at protecting yourself, and stop trusting you as a leader to protect them.

3. Hesitating and Self-Sabotaging: Sometimes, you’re your own worst enemy. Whether it’s procrastinating, or perfectionism, or self-doubt or flakiness, many people have a foot on the accelerator and another on the brake at the same time. They re-read emails six times before sending, they sign up for things and flake out last minute, they say yes to avoid conflict and overcommit, they say they want X but act the opposite. You can take an assessment to find out what your preferred self-sabotage method is. But yeah, stop doing that.

4. Seeking Approval: especially of those who’ll never give it, is a waste of time. Recognize that narcissists don’t just evaluate you, they determine the criteria of evaluation, and keep demanding you prove yourself. This (thank you, Brie Larson) is the only way to respond to such people.

5. Staying too long, until leaving stops being an option. Sometimes, we think we have to tough it out, stick with it, pick your favorite metaphor. We might tell ourselves it’s a sign of strength, but really we’re afraid of change. Afraid of what might happen if we let go, abandoned the cost we’ve sunk into this job, this relationship, this country, or afraid of who we might be without it.

So what happened, eventually, with Driving by Starlight? The same thing that happens to all my women protagonists in every one of my books. They make one of the three choices wholeheartedly and see how far it takes them. Yes, governments and organizations can make unreasonable demands on people, especially those already on the margins. Does that mean we have no agency? Absolutely not.

—by Anat Deracine

Reader’s Nook

An excerpt from The Milkyway Hotel by Marguerite Grimaud and Jude Silberfeld-Grimaud.

She opened the box. Her decorations were nothing special, some bulbs and a
couple of tinsel garlands, not too many since she’d never had space for a big tree
as an adult. Yet, even few and unremarkable, they were small fragments of
Christmas, through their function and purpose, yes, but it was more than that, the
fleeting shimmer when she lifted a garland and it caught the light, the jingling of
the multicolored bulbs, the scent, even, that had miraculously persisted since the
previous December. Although that could have been her imagination.

Perhaps because she’d grown up in Paris, a busy, noisy, beautiful yet
overwhelming city, in an apartment she’d loved but that had, at times, felt too small
for the energetic teenager, Christmas had always filled her with a sense of wonder
no other season warranted. When the city got dark and grey, buzzing with the
absolute pandemonium that was last minute shopping, honking cars seeming to
multiply as soon as winter temperatures moved in, as if the mere suggestion of
snow triggered a misguided instinct of survival that had what seemed like the
whole population of the city and its suburbs rush around like headless chickens,
that was when the miracle occurred.

Lights. Lights everywhere, pushing back at shadows and rain. The smell of
roasted chestnuts on the streets, sold in paper cones her parents had to hold to
protect her small hands from the heat, the initial disappointment at the small
number of nuts a five francs coin got her, the starchy flesh that filled her child-
sized mouth and turned out to also quickly fill her stomach.

The department stores’ Christmas window displays her grandmother would take
her and her visiting cousins to every year, and they’d delight in the cute and/or
funny animated scenes, enjoying every second despite —or maybe as well as—
being crushed in a throng of eager munchkins, all just as excited as she was.

And then there was the Christmas tree, which she’d beg her parents to keep long
after the end of December, its needles spreading through every room. Her parents
would grumble whenever some reappeared in the middle of spring, as if by magic,
but to her, they were a promise of a new tree, in just a few months.

Soon, she’d be choosing one of these trees for the Milkyway Hotel. The thought
made her heart race again, with anticipation. She could do this. Most importantly,
she wanted to do this.

First, however, she had more boxes to pack.

“Music,” she said aloud. “I need motivation music.” Flicking through her phone,
she settled on Savannah Grace’s Beware the Fury. Yeah, that would do nicely.

The SASS newsletter provides our community with information, analysis, resources, and even short sapphic fiction to keep us informed, mobilized, and connected. By working together to defend our community, our literature and our livelihoods, we can surmount the obstacles placed in our path and thrive!