Look at me, updating twice in the same year! Maybe 2025 is the year that blogging sticks. One can hope!

In any case, January 2025 was something of a lackluster month, in terms of both reading and writing. Back in 2023, to ease some of the stress I was putting on myself regarding my writing (and oh, that’s a blog post in and of itself; possibly a whole series!), I brought my daily writing goal down from 1,000 words a day/365,000 a year, to 500 words a day/182,500 a year. To be honest, that felt like a huge admission of defeat, and even more so now — despite lowering my expectations, I’ve barely even met the new goal, ever since.

All I need to do is make vague distressed noises and wave at my surroundings for an explanation, but explanations, however justified and understandable, don’t make me feel like less of a loser. So that’s something to work on, in these coming months: kindness, directed inward.

That said: what did I accomplish this month?

Well, victories first: I finally updated my long-languishing 2ha fic, A Tear in the Vein! This had literally been sitting on Ao3, un-updated, since September 2022. Big oof. I worked on it over the intervening years, but nothing felt worthy of being posted, and I had convinced myself it wasn’t going to be finished — which fed in to my “you are a loser at writing and also everything else” mentality. Fun times!

But, about a week ago, I had a thought: why not just chop the chapter off where I still felt confident about it, revise that, rewrite whatever needs to be rewritten and post that? Sure, it wouldn’t be the eighteen thousand word long chapters I was posting before, but why did the chapter have to be that long?

So, yesterday, I sat down, and chopped, and revised, and chopped some more, and rewrote, and wrote, and then revised it again, and posted it. I added a little explanation about why it had taken me so long, and thanked everyone for their patience, and then immediately lapsed into the well-known “commints? commints?” routine.

When the comments did arrive, they were uniformly kind and supportive, and so excited for me to be posting again.

Let me tell you: comments like that are pure cocaine in terms of writing energy. I have some other pieces I want to finish up before I go back to A Tear in the Vein (the ending is going to be Emotionally Devastating, and there are some fiddly bits I need to think about before I actually start writing), but I know I can finish it now. That’s a huge win.

I also worked a bit on my beloved dark fantasy sapphic romance novel, where the lesbians are stupid and the world is about ten seconds away from ending, and I also wrote about half of a project for my writing group: we’re each writing an alien romance, centered around the theme of matchmaking services. This is pure comfort writing, for me, and I get to explore a character that I’ve wanted to write about for a while.

All told, I only wrote 12,146 words in January 2025, but I also did morning pages every day. Not a bad month, but I’m hoping I can carry some energy over into February!

As for reading, well. I set my 2025 reading goal to 120 books for the year, which means I have to read an average of 10 per month to hit said goal. I read eight complete books in January 2025; I started a ninth, but finished it on February 1.

The first eight books were all rereads: The Queen’s Thief series, by Megan Whalen Turner, and A Memory Called Empire/A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine. All incredible books, all incredibly inspiring.

…and then I picked up Alex Pheby’s Mordew, because it sounded like my kind of weird: a young boy lives in a city built of the corpse of God, and develops power that threatens the Master of said city. There’s living Mud! Talking dogs! Bizarrely mutated people! Bacon!

It should have been fun, but I am a character-forward reader, and if the characters don’t hit, then the book won’t hit. The characters in Mordew are flat, without organic relationships or character arcs, and the protagonist is so passive it’s hard to feel interested in his story. The blurb on the back — the city, the boy, the god, the Master — only covers the last 100 pages, and everything up to that point is a wash-lather-rinse-repeat cycle of what feels like a Dickens homage (down to an Artful Dodger character).

It’s a 600+ page novel, with a glossary that takes up over 100 pages of that count. Suffice to say, this book was not for me, and I will not be reading the sequels. There may be another rant in me about why this book did not work, but that’s for another day.

Now: I have a bunch of romance novels and novellas that I can use to get my reading goal back on track, and I think I’ll be digging into the romance novels first. I need some yearning, some horniness, some MMCs who are in love but Real Mad About It. And if February isn’t the month for that, what month is?

Today, though, I’m working on a romance novelette of my own, which will hopefully be ready for submission by the end of the week. It’s another project that’s languished for too long, and I hope by clearing the deck (so to speak), I’ll clear the mental clutter, and be better at focusing on my writing.

Onward!