This will be the last time I sharpen my pencil to write a Sister Scribes article for Frost. There is no great drama, and next year will bring an exciting new group of writers to the magazine, but for now Sister Scribes has run its course.

When we started two years ago our writing careers were in very different places. Not all of us had publishers or agents, although some of us had indie published very successfully. We all had the luxury of a little more time. Now we find ourselves working on multiple projects, often for more than one publisher, and even with five of us in the team, producing a weekly article just isn’t tenable.

Of course it doesn’t mean we won’t remain friends – the connections between us are too strong for that. We have been through the best and worst of times together, and that forms incredible bonds. As we have said so many times before, writing can be a lonely business unless you have buddies.

I don’t think our positions are unusual. Everywhere I look around me, there are writers juggling tasks, deadlines looming over them, professional reputations on the line. It seems to me that once you are lucky enough to break down the doors to the publishing world, you can quickly become in great demand, while equally talented writers who perhaps don’t have the confidence, or the perseverance, or the luck of the right book landing on the right desk at the right time, look on from the outside, waiting for their turn.

But enough of this philosophising. We are close to the end of a year that has been frankly terrible for many, so let’s look forward. Let’s be positive and hopeful as we stare down the barrel of 2021.

Sister Scribes will be replaced in Frost by two elements, brought to you by the same team. Our ever popular monthly Reading Round Up will become Cariads’ Choice, and fortnightly we will bring you Welsh Writing Wednesdays.

The team is broadly the Cariad Chapter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, with a few other Welsh writers, or writers based in Wales, added for good measure. Although I live in Cornwall, because I am from South Wales, Cariad feels as though it is my natural chapter, and lockdown has made attending events so much easier; just a quick link onto Zoom rather than a three hour drive.

I met my first Cariads, Sue McDonagh and Jan Baynham, at the RNA Conference in 2017 and two years later they shared a flat with the Sister Scribes. I knew Jill Barry by email, because we were both signed to Endeavour at the time, and added Evonne Wareham to the list when we did a library talk together in Cardiff. Former Frost ‘Take Four Writers’ contributor Lucy Coleman is also a member, as is Sister Scribe Kitty Wilson, as she only lives just over the border in England and has become a Cariad too.

We have a private Facebook group and monthly Zoom meetings, and through this I have come to know the other members of the chapter, and I am sure you will enjoy doing the same next year. The articles pledged will be wide ranging, but inevitably landscape will feature more than once, as will Dylan Thomas. And I just know you are going to enjoy them.