So last night I alluded on Twitter to undertaking a blog project that was bigger than I originally realised. This is it. I read a fuckton of blogs, but obviously some I read more often than others and, with some work, I managed to narrow the list of my favourites to twelve. Between now and the twelfth day of Christmas, you’ll get a spotlight post a day on a particular blogger with my three favourite posts that they’ve written in 2014. The posts are in alphabetical, rather than preference, order, and if you’re not on the list, it doesn’t mean I’m not reading and/or enjoying your blog. At all. (Fuck, I hate potentially hurting people’s feelings.)

Anyway, that’s the concept. Alphabetically, the first blogger on the list is Ella Dawson, aka @brosandprose. Ella is a pretty new discovery of mine, which meant last night I had to trawl her archives to make sure my favourite posts were actually my favourite posts, but she may also be my best new blog discovery of the year. The girl writes both op-ed pieces and fiction like a dream.

So, my top three posts of Ella’s…

Let’s start with the piece she entered into (and won with) my anti-clickbait competition, Everything I learned about sex writing I learned from Taylor Swift. This one made me cry a bit, and there’s not much else I can say about it that I didn’t already say here, but fuck me, it’s good. Since she wrote it, it’s been all over the internet, including Thought Catalog, which only further serves to vouch for its excellence.

Post number two is Journal Entry: Morning Commute, which is vignette style (I do love a good vignette) and was described by someone as sounding ‘a lot like happiness.’

Finally is a much earlier post that I discovered for the very first time last night, Making smut out of politics. Here’s an extract:

I only began to write good fiction when I dared to address my own experiences and work backward. After all, my writing has always been about me. Despite what one is told, this introspection and mining of personal experience is not selfishness or arrogance. To quote Emily Gould, “If a woman writes about herself, she’s a narcissist. If a man does the same, he’s describing the human condition.” For a woman to recognize her feelings as valid is power and powerful. Writing about the harsh, gritty reality of this shiny thing that does not belong to you, that should not be yours to reveal, is a fierce activist project. That is where the “feminist” part of “feminist erotica” finally began to make sense to me.

Ella, I adore your writing and long may you continue in the same vein. Merry Christmas x