Fire up your February 28-day challenge

Let's get our energy back, boost our mood, and relight our fire. Join me!

1st February 2025 tomorrow. We made it! We’re through the darkest days of winter.

I’ve been holed up in my little cottage in the North. It’s certainly been cold, windy, and wild on the wide, open beaches of Northumberland. And after hibernating hard, I need to light my inner fires again to warm up and fire myself up to enable me to get back into the world again.

Want to join me?

That’s why I’m creating a special challenge for all paid subscribers this month, and the theme is Re-Light Your Fire.

I will be posting daily prompts on slowly firing up our creativity, our energy, and our mood after the long, cold months.

Don’t panic; I’m not suggesting energetic Take That dancing.

No, we’re embracing the magic of micro.

Yes, the tiny stuff: micro-adventures, micro-writing, micro-moments. Think of it as a month dedicated to proving that little changes lead to life-changing results or perhaps just a slightly better day.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sucker for the idea of big, bold transformations.

Write a book in a week! Save a million pounds in six months! Find your soulmate by the weekend! And yes, I have lived the odd bold leap myself, and I know and have interviewed (and coached) enough people to know that this can indeed be possible. Brave, bold leaps can be great to drive momentum. Back to the wall, you have no option but to keep on going.

But it’s not a leap year.

So let’s focus on a series of small baby steps this month—tiny actions, taken every day—that create momentum.

Take writing, for example. You don’t write a novel in a day. You write 200 words, then 200 more, and suddenly you’ve got a chapter. Before you know it, you’ve got a book (and maybe a few existential crises along the way).

So this February I will be sending you one writing prompt a day for your journal and encouragement to write every day and/or take one small action that will help fire you up after the long winter months.

Small actions are doable.

Baby steps are not intimidating, so you’re more likely to stick with them. Plus, they build momentum. And let’s not forget the ripple effect: a smile to a stranger can brighten their day. A small step in your career could open doors you never saw coming. These tiny moments have power.

And the latest research from Harvard shows that happiness is contagious. The more positive we can be, the more positivity we can beam out into the world. Always a bonus.

Our February Challenge:

For this month, commit to getting to the page every day with just one short journal entry and inspire yourself to take one tiny action every day that will make your life, work, or relationships better. Need inspiration?

Here’s a journal prompt to kick things off: Remember, small is mighty. Big transformations don’t happen overnight—they’re built one tiny, fabulous, imperfect step at a time.

Here’s a prompt for the first of the month:

What tiny change or action have you made in the past that has created something mighty in your life today?

A great example of this for me is when, rather heartbroken, lonely, and sad after a relationship breakup, I heaved myself off the sofa to go down for a book launch in The Accidental Bookshop, my beautiful indie bookshop in Alnwick. The wonderful writers and people I met on that evening led to us starting The Alnwick Story Fest, which is now in its third year.

Oak trees from acorns

Which is one of the reasons I am slowly building my energy because, at the end of the month, we’re hosting the festival with 57 events with world-class authors and a free fringe and rather delightful opening ceremony that we are going to announce soon. (Watch this space!) Authors and artists are arriving from all corners of the NE and the UK—from Sir Alexander McCall Smith to Adele Parks, MBE and I’ve had the delight of spending the winter reading all their books, and I can’t tell you how excited I am about meeting our authors in person.

Two of the authors are very relevant to this month’s challenge: Oliver Burkeman on how to create more meaning and purpose in our lives with his brilliant book Meditations for Mortals to Sumit Paul-Choudhury astrophysicist turned journalist, author of The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have The Power to Change The World.

Plus some of our very own Heart Leaping writers who are part of our community will be speaking too: Juliet Thomas will run a creativity workshop, Emma Simpson will be talking about her new book, Breaking Waves, Xanthe Gresham Knight will be our host in two brilliant story-telling sessions about mermaids, monsters, and goddesses—and how plants can kill—and talking about her brilliant books!

Do check out our programme and if you’re feeling fired up after our month-long challenge, then do come along.

www.alnwickstoryfest.com

And maybe you can kick off your writing career by entering our Fearless Writing competition (in memory and honour of Allyson Kent). 1000 words by 7th February. Come on - get writing!