I don’t know where 2025 went (although just as well that it’s gone, really).

I’m going to give an update of how writing went for me in December and then do a review of the whole year.

(In the next few days, I’ll write up my plans for 2026.)

I felt like I didn’t get a lot of writing work done in December, but that was mostly because I felt unfocused. (Also! When I don’t carefully track what I’m working on I have a tendency to dismiss how much I’ve actually done, so there’s that, too.)

I was distracted by the busy-ness of my day-job ahead of the holidays and, even more disruptively, I got an insulin pump (I’m a type 1 diabetic), which if I’m being honest, was a bit of a mindfuck (and not in the way I expected) and required in-person training and emails and familiarizing myself with a lot of new equipment and supplies.

However, during the holidays, I had a real breakthrough with the novel (I think–could be a novella!) I’ve been working on sporadically (but occasionally at some length!) for the last couple of years.

After going through a first draft I low-key hated and thought was really fucking boring and then developing other possible scenarios for the basic premise (it’s about a medieval beguine and an alien), I’ve kind of come full circle, but in a more focused way that makes so much more sense. I wouldn’t say the time has been wasted, because I think I had to work through the possibilities and see why the original idea was far too vague. (Also, going to begijnhofs in Ghent, Bruges, and Amsterdam in 2024 helped a great deal in helping me visualize and develop that part of that story.) There’s still (a lot of) work to be done, but I feel much better about it now and I already have an ending (what is happening to me?).

I also worked on some possible short story ideas targeted at upcoming submission calls and submitted a couple already written and previously rejected stories.

Year in review

• 1 story published
  • “The Fish of Cart Lake,” in Ghost to Ghost to Ghost: an anthology of haunting tales from Canada, edited by M.M. MacLeod (Frost Zone Press), October 21 2025 (Order the ebook and paperback here.)
  • I want to say I wrote this fairly quickly in the spring in response to the call for submissions, but with the caveats that the setting is a) a real place I have visited and took pictures of and b) based on something I wrote in a different, non-horror form for a now-abandoned novella.

• 2 stories pending
  • “Foliaceous,” in the anthology of future fiction from the Manufactured Ecosystems project, which I sort of began in 2024, but mostly wrote from January to April this year and then submitted. It should be out fairly soon.
  • “The Orchard-Bay,” in Stellar Parallax: Human Hope in Grimdark Worlds (Fall 2026).
    • I wrote this in the spring for the submission call. It’s a combination of a couple of different story ideas that weren’t coming together in a very satisfying way on their own. I’ll write more about the development of this story after it’s published.

• 1 non-fiction piece published
  • “Volunteering Something of Myself” (non-fiction) in Heartlines Spec (Issue 9) (currently for paid subscribers only)
  • I’m really happy with this. I wrote it entirely in November and it came out at the end of the month.

I’m quite satisfied with what I accomplished, although the list doesn’t really touch on all writing and submitting and research and thinking and such that goes unlisted because it doesn’t result in pieces to share.

I was going to include writing-adjacent things I did this past year, but I’ve gone on long enough. I’ll save those for another post.

Take care.