Tag Archives: Happy New Year

My Bookish Things in 2025 + Goals for 2026

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It’s 2026!

And boy does it feel like 2025 has been A YEAR. As the ‘Winners & Losers of 2025‘ episode of NPR’s It’s Been A Minute podcast describes it:

“Politics feels off. The entertainment industry here in Los Angeles where I am feels totally off. It feels off all the way from New York as well. Yeah. And so everything feels off and yet we’re all still dancing.”

Indeed a lot of ‘dancing’ has happened in 2025. In some ways perhaps more than I’ve ‘danced’ in any of the years since I began these ‘wrap-up’ style posts in 2022. I generally think of 2021 as a kind of record in terms of ‘productivity’, with nearly a book a week read, quarterly newsletter posts and stories going out, a 1st draft of a novel finished, and a short story self-published on Amazon.

But 2025 may have been even BUSIER if such a thing is possible.

2023 may have been the year that we ‘switched back on’ after the pandemic, but 2025 feels like the year that we finally got back to full power. EVERYTHING seems to have happened in 2025.

In the world outside of my reading and writing habits, the things I struggled with the most in 2025 were inflation and stagnant wages. It feels like everything has become soooo expensive. And the money coming in just isn’t there.

So it might make sense that I’ve used ‘art’ as a bit of an escape. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

But also ‘making art’ this year has felt pretty brutal as well and I think that’s because it’s hard to make art when things aren’t going well. It’s commonly held that ‘suffering’ (or at the very least STRESS) is needed to be productive artistically. I generally hold that the opposite is true.

But if we’re just looking at numbers and output, 2025 seems to bear out the more commonly held belief.

In any case, I don’t want this post to be all doom and gloom. I have had plenty to be thankful for this year, and many amazing opportunities have come my way despite the general pallor of the year.

I was lucky enough not to have any major issues with my house (Ok literally as I was typing up this post my washer stared leaking water everywhere), and we finally (at the end of January) opened the makerspace/recording studio which I manage, and have — in just a year — seen over 360 visits without any major marketing pushes or grand opening events. And I also completed a library certification!

In guitar-world, I participated in a six-session Grateful Dead jam, learned some 22 songs, and a whole host of things about my instrument. I also participated in my first ‘Flash Band‘ which saw me jamming with a bunch of other local musicians, and will culminate in a concert come February.

So yea . . . BUSY.

But we’re here to wrap up my reading and writing for 2025 and set goals for 2026, so let’s do that!

Writing in 2025

Last year, I had essentially two writing goals:

  • A post a week on this blog
  • 2,000 words a week (abt 500 words per week day) on the 2025 novel

Had I actually hit that goal, I would have had somewhere around 106,000 words of fiction, and . . . whatever I managed to type here on the blog (in 2024: around 63K over 59 posts)

I DID manage to keep up about a post a week on the blog, with 57 posts totaling in about 62,000 words.

My fiction writing was a little more sparse, but honestly, still quite good all things considered. I did not write 2,000 words a week, but DID manage somewhere near that for 38 of the 53 weeks. That’s 80K towards the new novel, about 75% of what I was hoping to accomplish.

Between the blog and the novel, I wrote about 142,981 words which . . . technically more than 2021 (142,341) which I think is my highest output year ever?

Some highlights for me on this blog were:

Of course I had fun doing #WyrdAndWonder and #JurassicJune and #Blaugust as well, but I think that is kind of expected by now.

Reading 2025

As for my reading? It looks like I’ll be finishing out the year with 33 books read (9,160 pages), just two books shy of my 35 book goal. I did read at least two Cosmere stories, Tress of the Emerald Sea and Sixth of the Dusk, but I’m still woefully behind there.

Another goal I worked towards this year was to read more things I already own before purchasing new books. There’ll be more to come on this in future posts, but I actually think I did a pretty decent job.

Anyway, the longest book I read was Onyx Storm. The shortest was The Grownup. Most popular was Gone Girl (review to come).

A few books which stood out to me this year (for being good):

Books I wished were better:

Writing in 2026

It’s clear to me that my 2,000 words of fiction a week goal is perhaps slightly too ambitious. Not only did I not meet it, but after a full year of trying I’m pretty burnt out. However, 3/4 of the way there is feeling quite close, and some quick math says that if I can just keep things up until the end of February, I’ll be across the finish line.

So, writing goals for 2026 might look a little something like this:

  • A post a week on the blog
  • 2,000 words a week on the 2025 novel until the end of February
  • Re-read The Last Draft and Refuse To Be Done in March and April
  • May or sometime after: Begin revisions on 2025 novel

I honestly have no idea what my revision process is going to look like for this book since — despite claiming I’d learned a whole bunch of revision strategies back in 2022 — I have virtually no idea what first steps might be. I’ve been receiving feedback each week as I’ve been drafting so I think a lot of the necessary course corrections were happening in real-time.

But it also means that the original chapters I wrote for this were started (by now) a full year ago. So perhaps step one will just be to read the whole thing through once and see where I’m at. We shall see!

Reading in 2026

Once again, I was only JUST SHY of hitting my goal for 2025, so for 2026 I think I’ll just keep it the same (35 books), and see how I do.

In my End of Year Book Tag (2025) post, I mention keeping up with my book club reads, finishing the Bartimaeus books, and maybe starting Harry Potter. I’ve also challenged myself to re-read the Murderbot Diaries before splurging on Apple+ so I can watch the show. Antimatter Blues and the Silo books seem to be calling as well.

Finally, I’ve been watching a lot of Youtube videos about capitol “L” literature (aka literary fiction). Consequently now I’d like to give some of that a try. We’ll see if I do.

The End

What are y’all’s goals for 2026? Reading? Writing? Go ahead and post them in the comments. I’m interested to see what ya’ll have been doing. Until next week!

My Bookish Things in 2024 + Goals for 2025

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It’s that time of year again. Wrap-Up season, in which creators across the internet feel the need produce annual report style documents which attempt to justify being in business for the upcoming year by listing their successes in the previous year . . .

Wow, that sounds a bit cynical. That’s actually not how I think of these types of posts, which I actually DO ENJOY READING! It’s important for creatives of any stripe to take stock of their work, and listing accomplishments can be a much needed ego (and motivational) boost when the grind gets you down.

I’ll admit that 2024 did not have the same kind of momentum for me as 2023, in which it seemed like the whole world kind of ‘turned back on’ after (since?) COVID-19. That is not to say 2024 did not have important cultural moments (recent elections come to mind, so does Fourth Wing lol), but in my own little sphere things have been a bit more plodding.

I joined a second book club. Took a few golf lessons (I’m still woefully bad). Bought a new guitar (a CHEAP acoustic which I love), and went to a few concerts. Looking back it seems like nothing too crazy although I’m sure it seemed like a lot as it was happening at the time.

The highlights for me this year were probably the little bit of traveling I managed to throw together in dribs and drabs. I had an amazing time out at the Calvert Cliffs fossil hunting back in September, and a trip to Fonthill Castle in October for a wedding resulted in a really amazing history lesson, and some great finds at a local used book store. Give Henry Chapman Mercer a quick Google. Fascinating dude.

And perhaps the most relevant trip (to what I normally talk about on this blog) was to Deep Creek Maryland for my first ever WRITER’S RETREAT!! We were not able to light any actual fires because of a local fire ban (something to do with too many dry leaves), but I’ll say that the trip really reignited the spark for me as it pertains to writing fiction.

So with that enthusiasm firmly in hand, let’s begin by reviewing my writing in 2024 and see what goals we have for 2025 (reading review and goals will come later on).

Writing in 2024

My goals for 2024 looked something like this:

  • Continue to write a post a week on this blog
  • Finish Klatch of Clans (short story)
  • Revise Like Clockwork
  • Write Greek Mythology inspired short story code named: Stoic Tale
  • Publish these 3 short stories along with all my other short fiction in a collection
  • Revise / rewrite Aegyptosaur
  • Maybe just do a little work on Aegyptosaur 2 since I’m in the neighborhood.

I think I actually managed 59 posts on the blog in 2024, crushing last year’s total of 44 (which my calculator tells me is about 34% more posting!), so I’m very happy with that number. Some blogging that I really enjoyed doing was:

Getting a Bit Nostalgic

I’ve often thought of myself (and likely wrote about myself as such on this blog) as someone who doesn’t really give in to nostalgia. This year, was apparently the collapse of that assumption as 2024 marked the 25th anniversary of many (apparently) formative media experiences in my life — to the point where I’m becoming convinced that 1999 was quite possibly the best year in cinema. Anyway, reviews of two movies from that hallowed era made their way onto the blog, the first celebrating the 25th anniversary of The Mummy (1999), and then later a look at The Matrix.

#Blaugust

This was the first year I participated in #Blaugust and pretty much everything that went along with that was incredible. Just the exposure to a bunch of new blogs and bloggers was worth it on its own (plus everyone was so nice and welcoming), but the event also pushed me to write about some different topics than I’m used to, and it was a fun to get creative in that way (Ironically (or perhaps not) the post which got me thinking about creativity the most was about the Things Do I Do To Stay Creative. We’re getting real meta over here)

I hope I can participate again next year!

Standing With The Banned

2024 was the first year I specifically chose to review a banned book during #BannedBooksWeek. I ended up choosing Ender’s Game which was also an important book for me personally (again with the nostalgia) as it was one of a couple books that really got me interested in Science Fiction during high school (which was not in 1999 however).

I think just looking at the list and seeing what has been banned is an important exercise. I was shocked by many of the titles present.

Fiction Writing in 2024

I accomplished basically zero of my fiction writing goals this year. I’d like to give some worthy excuse for why but each time I try to explain it, I come up empty handed. It seems that unfortunately fiction writing was just not a huge priority for me this year. It’s just the way the cookie crumbled.

That doesn’t mean that I didn’t work on stuff this year however. Some highlights for me were:

  • Writing a flash piece for a friend’s game
  • Writing about 14k of a new novel focused around Griffins
  • Finally getting some momentum going on Stoic Tale which is not finished but probably at least half way done.
  • Completing my first draft of Klatch of Clans.

So, not my most productive year, but progress was still made. As I mentioned before, the writing retreat back in November really kickstarted a few things for me, so I’m hopeful 2025 will be my year!

Anyway, let’s take a look at my reading stats . . .

Reading in 2024

My goals for 2024 as it pertains to reading were as follows

Results here are a bit mixed. I definitely surpassed my number-of-books goal with about 40 books read for the year. A few which stand out for being excellent were:

A few that stand out for not being too great:

I did not catch all the way up with the Cosmere, but I did get slightly further along finishing Shadows of the Self and The Lost Metal. No progress was made in Winternight or Witcher land, and while I didn’t read any more Percy Jackson or books set in Ancient Egypt, I DID read some more dinosaur books with Remnants of Ancient Life for #DinosaurDay and Michael Crichton’s The Lost World for it’s anniversary this year (MOAR nostalgia!)

I think that about wraps up my 2024. Lets take a look at my plans for 2025 . . .

Writing in 2025

It seems somewhat a shame to create completely new writing goals in 2025 when so many goals from 2024 were left incomplete; however, I’ve carried many of these goals year after year for quite some time and in 2024 I’ve started to wonder if I’m not making the progress towards finishing them because perhaps in some way I’ve already outgrown the thing which started them in the first place. This insight came while reading How To Be Everything which suggests that when creatives — the book is in reference to multipotentialites, I’m connecting it to the term creative — get bored or uninspired by a job or project, it’s because they’ve already taken what they need from it, whether it be a skill or expression or feeling.

I’m not giving up on these projects, but I am going to take some time away from them as they are preventing me from pursuing other avenues I find genuinely interesting. For example, my writing group will be undertaking a year-long novel writing challenge this year. I’m excited to participate, but started spinning a bit considering which project I should prioritize and how it would actually work in practice, could I finish my short fiction around it? How would that effect what I was doing on the blog? And my guitar routine? . . . And so I decided to put all that other stuff aside (except the guitar), start a new novel in 2025 and see where it takes me.

I’ll still continue to aim for a post a week on this blog, but mostly my fiction writing goals will look different. The whole thing should look something like this:

  • A post a week on the blog
  • 2,000 words a week (abt 500 per week day) on the 2025 novel

And that. Is. It.

We’ll see if this actually works out, but I figure there is little harm in trying. I can always pivot and work on the old stuff later if things don’t work out.

Reading in 2025

I’ll also be retiring a few goals here, but not nearly as many. With the recent release of Wind and Truth and all my friends buzzing about Cosmere things again, I’m really regretting not having tried harder last year to get through the secret projects before this new release. So I’m doubling down. Onyx Storm comes out at the end of January and after that it’s no sleep til Brooklyn. Cosmere or GTFO until it’s done hahah. Can’t wait.

I forgot to mention this earlier, but something else happened this year which is definitely shaping my forecast for 2025. I ran out of shelving for all my books. Obviously this is not a huge deal, but it really made me look at which items I’ve read and which are just gathering dust. Many of the books I have were never read, many others have been read but were never reviewed here on the blog.

Needless to say, I’ve begun a bit of an unofficial weeding program which I’ll be continuing through 2025. My hope is to have read and reviewed (here) everything that I get rid of. We’ll see if this process actually creates any space on the shelf or just backs me up even more hahah.

With all of that in mind, reading in 2025 should look a little something like this:

  • 35 books read (small increase)
  • COSMERE
  • Reading books I own before buying new ones . . .

That’s a Wrap!

Well, that’s all I have for you this time. Thank you sooo much for reading all the way until the end. Honestly I’m pretty amazed you did. I’m curious what goals you’ve set for the new year and was there anything you want to brag about which happened in 2024? Anything you wish you could brag about but didn’t quite get?

As always please leave your thoughts in the comments. I’m excited to hear how everyone’s year went, and what they’re hoping to do next year!

Until next time!

My Bookish things in 2021 + Goals for 2022!

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I guess it’s that time of year (now that I’m back from fishing). A chance to look back on what we’ve done, and what we still hope to do. I’ve accomplished a lot since I decided to bring this blog back (ahem baaacckkk!!) last February, but of course there is still so much more I’d like to do.

I was definitely worried about over-promising and under-delivering, but I think I managed to stay pretty consistent while (IMHO) also remaining flexible and pursuing new opportunities as they arrived. There were definitely a few things that I didn’t get around to or did not turn out the way I wanted them to because I had to rush or because I didn’t know what I was doing. Such is life . . .

As I write this post I’m still deciding where I need to ease off, and where I’d like to lean in, but more or less, I’m pretty proud of all the stuff I’ve done in 2021, and am definitely looking forward to new experiences in 2022.

I think from here, I’ll go into the recap and what y’all can hopefully expect for the future.

2021 Reading:

This was good year for me reading wise. I managed to read 43 books totaling 15,340 pages. That was 34% more than my original goal of 32 books read (granted I didn’t really distinguish between novellas and novels. If it was on goodreads I counted it!). The most popular book I read was DUNE by Frank Herbert (no surprise there). And the least popular was Death Dogs: The Jackal Gods of Ancient Egypt. I’m sure you can guess which I enjoyed more. I rated most books 4 stars, and Brandon Sanderson’s Rhythm of War was the highest rated that I read.

You can see all the gritty details on my My Year In Books page on Goodreads. Most of these books were 2021 Hugo Nominees in preparation for voting for Worldcon 2021 / Discon III (recap of that to coming soon). Please feel free to check out my reviews of all the Hugo nominated works I read in 2021. I would love to know if you’ve read any and what your thoughts were.

2021 Writing

I had a pretty ambitious year planned out for 2021 writing wise. And honestly I think I did alright. My goal was to write 500 words a day in 2021, with the caveat that I would write 1667 each day during November because of Nanowrimo. If I had stayed on track (and participated in Nanonwrimo), I would have written something like 230,000 words by the end of the year.

That did not happen.

If my trusty writer-bot on Discord is correct, and I logged things properly and the bot didn’t screw up too bad keeping track (it’s not that trusty hahah), then I ended up writing 142,341 words this year.

Honestly, not too bad.

That’s only 323 words shorter than Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. A bit of a weird metric but I’ll take it.

Tracking where all these words went is pretty much too confusing for me so I didn’t really attempt to. I can tell you that 63,786 of them are on this blog. The other 78.5k? I’m not sure but they were probably part of various projects I’ve been working on which I’ll describe below.

Writing Projects (mostly) Completed in 2021!

I had to scroll sooo far back to find this haha

Aegyptosaur 1st Draft Complete!

So, perhaps the biggest accomplishment of 2021 was finally finishing my draft of Aegyptosaur (though I’m not married to that title), my Ancient Egypt and Dinosaurs novel. I’ve started many novels in the past, but this was the first I’ve ever finished a full draft of.

A couple of things allowed me to do this, the first was probably that I wasn’t going out really because of Covid. Second, I joined the “Novel Round” in my writing group in which we all agreed to read and critique each other’s novels. I had to have something finished by July so I set a deadline for myself to finish April 1st . . .

As you can see by the tweet, I missed that deadline by 29 days, but was still able to finish, proofread and edit it down to 119k. I got a lot of feedback from the group, some good, some not so good, and so my plan for 2022 is to do rewrites and start pitching to agents and publishers. We’ll see how that goes. I’m giving myself until the end of 2022 to make it happen. If it doesn’t . . . Amazon lol.

Narmer and the God Beast Self-Published on Amazon!

My second achievement, was that I published a short story, Narmer and the God-Beast on Amazon. This book is set in the same world as the novel mentioned above but thousands of years in that world’s past. I’m really happy with the way it turned out, and I’m hopeful it will have some success.

I’m also in love with the cover I had created for it, so . . . yea. Enjoy!

I did a series of posts here on the blog in which I talked about my influences for the piece as a kind of “Lead up” to the story’s launch. It was really fun, but also put a lot of pressure on me to keep up consistent posting here. I can’t really say whether it was a success or failure as I think I’m still new in the author world. Anyway, feel free to check them out. I enjoyed writing them:

Last awesome achievement: I got my newsletter started!

The last thing about 2021 that I’m really excited about accomplishing was finally setting up my newsletter. I’d like for the newsletter to be where people following me can get info like what I’m posting in this year-in-review, meaning updates about my life and writing, inspiration, and announcements about new projects (and maybe even discounts!). So far I’ve used it to tease a few ideas I have for new projects, and posted a few completely free newsletter exclusive short fiction pieces. Here’s a sample newsletter I posted to my blog with the story Master of Secrets.

In October, I posted one other original piece about a house haunted by a Victorian-age AI. I’ve done a preview of Boutilier House on my blog too, as well as a glimpse of my revisions for it.

At the end of my Bear and the Nightingale review, I had hoped that I’d have a second short story for you all on January 14th, involving witches, mystery, and Russian fairy tales. However, it seems that story does not want to be short-story length and so I’m hopeful I can still give a good preview for everyone, though it won’t be a short story.

Anway, if any of that interested you, please sign up for my newsletter!

For the blog!

I’m starting to get tired so I’ll make this part quick, but there were a couple blog events I took part in this year which were really fun. Mostly they’re just hashtags I followed and tried to post content for. I’ll list them, and describe briefly what they are. The linked text will go to the posts I wrote for the events but I definitely recommend looking them up on your own on twitter.

  • #wyrdandwonder – A celebration of the Fantasy genre during the month of May.
  • #DinosaurDay – June 1st, a day to celebrate dinosaurs!
  • #JurassicJune – A month long celebration of all things Jurassic Park
  • #smaugust – This is actually a drawing challenge in which you draw a dragon every day for a month based on some prompts. I WROTE something dragon related for four Fridays based on the prompts.
  • #dinovember – Just a celebration of dinosaurs during November. I mainly just posted any dino content I’d already written.
  • #scifimonth – A celebration of the Science Fiction genre during the month of November.

Looking at 2022

Looking at 2022, I think I’d like to pare back a little bit. My priorities are:

  • Read 40 books in 2022
  • Write 145,000 words. It’s a smaller goal than 2021, but still more than I actually achieved in 2021.
  • Finish edits on the novel and pitch it to an agent or publisher (why the above word goal is lessened)
  • Participate in the hashtags I’ve listed and try to do one more new one
  • 4 newsletters (hopefully with at least 2 newsletter exclusive short stories)
  • 1st draft of a second (much shorter) novel involving the Russian-Fairy-Tale-Mystery premise. (maybe during Nanowrimo)
  • Start Narmer and the God Beast 2 . . . ?

Looking at this list, I’m not sure I’ve actually pared back at all, but only time will tell. One complicating factor that really put a lot of stress on me was going back to work in-person. Presumably, this will be the case for 2022 as well, so I may have to pare back even further, but we’ll do it live and see how things go.

Wish me luck!

So that’s it folks. My major accomplishments in 2021, and what I’m hoping to accomplish in 2022. Please let me know your thoughts. Too much? Not enough? Advice? (Please post advice!). And as always thanks so much for reading all this. Please post any thoughts or opinions in the comments.

See you next time!