It’s me, your girl, taking another whack at the blogging thing! I think I’ve found an odd sort of consistency re: blogging, in that I keep trying regularly to blog regularly, and I think that counts for something.

A note to my slightly future self: let’s work on this blog template, shall we?

But first! A look at 2025, and how I fared in reading, writing, and life.

Reading!
I initially set my reading goal for 120 books, since I handily met and then exceeded that goal in 2024 (by only three books, but still!), but about halfway through the year, I ran into the wall that was Seth Dickinson’s Exordium, and while fighting for two weeks with it, lost all my reading momentum. It took most of the year to get it back.

Now — Exordium is not a bad book, and as a fan of the game Destiny, I like Dickinson’s writing, but something about the repetitive (almost defensively so) plot, the formatting of the book itself (small print, relatively low-contrast ink), and the incredibly dark premise, I just could not finish it, but I also didn’t want to admit that it wasn’t working for me. So. Lesson learned — or rather, lesson reinforced: it’s okay to put something aside, for a moment or forever or for any length of time between those two points.

I ended up dropping my goal to 100 books for the year, and got a late-year bit of momentum back, helped by having a truly luxurious week and a half off for the holidays. I read 103 books this year, and plan to write about my best-of list tomorrow. One interesting data point is that I reached for comparatively more literary fiction this year than I have for many years, and that seems to be a trend continuing into 2026. At least, for the first four days of 2026.

Writing
I want to start this section out with an actual, unassailable win: my first published short story, “Miracle Aisle”, came out in the Autumn 2025 issue of A Coup of Owls! It’s a slightly gross, slightly creepy story about a retail worker who starts to encounter strange going-ons in their store, and instead of being afraid, decide to go along for the ride. I am delighted to have my words in such a cool magazine (and funnily enough, two other members from one of my writing groups have been published in ACOO too, so clearly they’re picking up what we’re putting down!), and I’m still carrying the validation with me: I am an Author now, on top of being a Writer.

As for other writing…hm. I won’t say this is a failed year; despite my word count continuing to drop, I still wrote a lot: 180584 words. That’s pretty impressive, especially since it was almost all original fiction. I do think it’s important for me to remember that when I was churning out 400,000+ words a year, I was doing so with fanfic. All the scaffolding was in place; I didn’t have to spend time worldbuilding or charting character arcs. I just had to recontextualize material that already existed. Now, everything is from the ground up, and that takes time.

Also: the fascism. It needs to be said.

I did manage to update my last lingering fic, a 2ha AU called “A Tear in the Vein”. Given that this poor fic had languished for almost two years between updates, this was very satisfying. Still one chapter to go, but I’m at the emotional climax, which should be very fun to write! At some point this year!

Otherwise, I worked on two connected books, part of a planned trilogy I’m calling the Druid Romances. Mostly I am using these books to deal with my feelings about Dragon Age, D&D, and BG3 — especially my feelings about Dragon Age, and how I had to stop playing DATV before it killed my love for the entire franchise. As with pretty much all my original fiction, they connect to a big paracosm, but I’m still working on how the three planned stories all interconnect. It’s a fun project!

Toward the end of the year, though, I went back to the Dashaverse, my dark fantasy apocalyptic sapphic romance — a very thematically appropriate thing to work on as the year gets colder and darker, given that most of the action takes place on a windswept, frozen mountain that periodically vomits out horrors that our heroine has to kill. My goal is to keep up the momentum on this project, and hopefully have a finished draft at the end of the year…so here goes!

Life
At the beginning of February 2025, I had to say goodbye to Orpheus, my weird, confident, adaptable, shrimp-obsessed, loud cat. I had him for eight years out of his fifteen, and there are still moments when I turn my head because I think I’ve glimpsed him from the corner of my eye — but those eight years were great. He was truly the best first cat-of-my-own I could have asked for, and I will never stop missing him.

I spent three months telling myself I would never get another cat, but ended up starting to look at different rescues. Then, on the Saturday before Easter, my parents’ neighbor (who had just adopted a cat herself) came over with pictures of another cat at a local shelter. “She’s the most gorgeous cat I’ve seen. I already told the adoption lead about you, you should go see her!”

Reader, I adopted her. Lady Annabelle Blue is a very different cat than Orpheus — affectionate, a bit of a crybaby, not food-motivated whatsoever (except for Churus), playful, dainty, demure. She’s perfect, just as he was.

So, we’ve arrived at 2026. May it be the joyful, just, and peaceful we all deserve — and may we all work toward making it so.