#7 Shortest month, biggest adventures

bridget + buttercream + bird song

👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼 Hi! I’m so happy to see you. I’m Laura Jane Williams, a UK-based romance author. How to Build a Life launched in August 2024, and now has thousands of readers in over 80 countries (!). You can expect personal stories about life’s mess and mayhem, and the search for a way of living that feels right. I’m almost 40, a solo parent by choice, and for 2025 am committed to stealing back time from my to-do list. I’m just sick of being busy with stuff that doesn’t really matter, you know?

(pssst! I just revealed all the details about my summer 2025 book. Please do consider pre-ordering: it’s the single best way to help authors you love!)

Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards is my monthly round-up doing exactly that: reviewing the month gone and then thinking ahead. I find it helps remind me how awesome I am. I recommend it! Plus it’s nice sharing these bits and bobs with you :) So without further ado, this was my February, and what I’m looking forward to in March…

homespo i like, a very good book, i think i look quite glow-y!, the teddies wanted to watch tv too, photo by my kid, my £12.50 trousers, new lime green coat, two courses at IKEA for less than £20 for 2, i needed to mix my buttercream for longer, womp

Looking Backwards…

So, I’m trying to do less of what doesn’t matter. Since the new year - and the new routine we currently have in this family - that has included not keeping a showroom for a house. Like, it’s okay if there are dishes in the sink, or shoes in the hallway. Indeed these are often the things that make a house feel like a home. Our home. However. I cleaned maybe once in Jan/Feb (more for the bathroom though, I’m not a monster!!) and by last week I hated my house. We were on half term, I needed two full days doing absolutely nothing before I could even consider doing something, and sat around reading and watching TV I gradually looked around me and was like… ewwww, these dust bunnies! That odor! This place is awful! We’re going to have to move!!!

As it turns out, a gut-wrenching deep clean is what the place needed, and now I can’t believe I get to live here, that I made all this, that the vibes can be this immaculate. If you count the hallways as a room, and in terms of decorating I do, we’ve got nine rooms in our house. Five are fully decorated, and when they are clean and tidy and I have used my new Vileda turbo spin mop and Flash floor wash on them, are exquisite. Before Easter I’d like to have painted the family bathroom and put up some shelves and art in there, which is all I can really do. Unless I rip everything out and get a fully new suite and the whole thing retiled - and god, I want to, those builder-grade tiles hurt my heart, my soul, my everything - a lick of paint and the LJW touch will have to suffice. But I am optimistic about this!

getting that french bob bobbed, sunday roast (on a friday), i enjoyed this, preview copies are in!, we listen to this soundtrack TOO MUCH, feeling cute, another hike!, another fantastic read, morning tea

February was a lot of walking, tea, and marvelling at the trousers I got in the Uniqlo sale. £12.50! I’m still not over it! I also saw a video on Instagram that said if the bob ain’t bobbing anymore, go shorter, so you’d best believe the instruction I gave Beth, my new Gen-Z stylist who has saved my aesthetic life, was “Go as short as possible!” I have a very low hair line at the back of my neck, so it isn’t actually as short as I’d like but I didn’t want to commit to shaving my neck just yet, because as we know from unkempt men, a fuzzy neck ain’t the one. But. Maybe next time? Maybe. I said MAYBE!!

In other news, how many times have you seen the new Bridget Jones movie? I went twice in four days, booking the second viewing as I was leaving the theatre for the first. I went with the gym girlies, after tapas, and our row of nine went down like dominoes in the first fifteen minutes: ping, ping, ping, each one of us sobbing one after the other like we were passing the popcorn, except it was unabashed emotion.

I could write a whole essay about that movie, I really could. I thought it was perfect. Those first fifteen minutes, getting the overview of Bridget’s new life, the ghosts of her past, the brightness (and enduring grief) of her present, her gradual understanding that she really does still have a future, it was narratively perfect. I was strapped in and ready for the ride after that, wanted the world for the lass I did. I found the whole thing a joyous celebration of midlife. Bridget looks great, she’s got a lovely house and kids who are NICE. So many shows about mothers highlight how awful their children are, how ungrateful and screen-obsessed and snarky they can be. That isn’t my experience of parenthood at all, not in totality, and seeing Bridget do the macarena in a morning and sling the butterfly wings down into the hall before they leave for school, and stopping off for hot chocolate even though they’re late for the concert… that’s the parenthood I know. I loved every second of Hugh Grant, and melted as he called her the love of his life. I believe that is true, she is! And Bridget learned so much from him when she was younger about how love isn’t enough if your behaviour is fuckwittery. I do believe he loves her! But Bridget always deserved more. In fact, I loved the parallel of the scenes with her dad. I think her dad was the first person to model total acceptance to Bridget, and she spent her life looking for a man who could mirror that. And I think Daniel Cleaver loves Bridget because Bridget is that radical acceptance for him. Oh, to be accepted as our whole selves!! Of course, Darcey popping up was at all the right times, and what the man she ends up with does for her, gifts her and her children… sublime. And then the last ten minutes, the big party with all the old faces in one room! In fact, all the call-backs throughout: her pajamas, the see-through top, the blue cocktails, Bridget calling bed Bedfordshire, her wearing Mark Darcey’s shirt, the kid wearing Mark Darcey’s Christmas jumper. I COULD GO ON!!!!!!

would lose the belt next time, nice advice, SUPERB book i want to read again already, new £10 kitchen stool, my kid said i looked like sabrina carpenter???, love the new hair with a cap, 5am writers club, a landslide cake, a photo i sent to my aunt demonstrating the landslide cake

I’ve made a few cakes this month, and I don’t know what my problem is but both have been levels of disaster. A coffee cake I made for mum’s birthday tasted fine, but aesthetically the buttercream needed way longer with a whisk in it because it wasn’t until after I assembled it that I realised it was grainy. It’s the thought that counts, though, right?! And then on the last day of half term my kid requested we make a Victoria Sponge cake, an activity he normally does with Grandma. I always forget how much I don’t really like Victoria Sponge until I eat it and it makes me feel nauseous. The only one that doesn’t is Auntie Shirley’s, I think because she uses lemon in the batter and in the filling, to lift it, but oh my word. I used Bon Mamam conserve because it was in the fridge already, and conserve is not seedless jam in terms of its consistency (that’s the point of buying it! It’s luxe!) and so the lack of cement-like vim meant as soon as I over-handled the buttercream (compensating for the coffee cake) and piped it on, everything started sliding off, and then with the top sandwich on the weight was too much and everything came pouring out of the sides and it was officially a Picasso Cake: eye over here, ear over there, filling all around it. Two hours later I got my period and I thought, you know what? Life’s too short to keep being mad at runny jam.

And finally, in case you missed it this month these are the things I wrote about:

// what if you stopped trying to do everything (i am) // a very good hour // dressing for the weather // all about my new job // change isn’t supposed to be neat

Looking Forwards…

Well, I regret to inform you that I am now the owner of some proper walking trousers and also a proper walking jackety-coat thing (technical term), so our marches through the Peak District will continue as we train to hike Scarfell Pike, and I will look damned slick doing so. I’ve started the edits for my 2026 book so will be spending more time with that, which as we know is a joy and a pleasure. And announcing a few 2025 tour dates too! I can’t be away from home a lot so have been selective about where to go and when: and spoiler alert: we’re not just focussing on London. We’re going regional, baby!

March looks kind of “big” as I look in my diary, probably because there are no school holidays and so it’s a continuous mass of more-of-the-same. But I’ve got a lot to say about the unexpected perks I’ve found in routine, in being forced to be somewhere and marching to the beat of an organisation’s drum and not my own. You can look forward to that!

Of course, I can’t sign off without noting that the evenings are lighter now, aren’t they? And as I continue to be part of the 5am writers club (with the caveat that I got to bed at 8pm; we all make our choices) I’m pleased to note that somewhere after about 6.15am the birds start to sing. When I go get up my kid at 7 the sun is already up in the sky. Forward movement, man. It doesn’t feel like it happens it all, and then it happens all at once.

See you soon,

Laura x