If there’s one tweak to a famous quote I love it’s, “We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.” If this doesn’t describe this year’s creative efforts, then I hope I don’t give myself nearly as much to do next year. I figured I was due a break after a few years of recording and publishing audiobooks for The Fluxion Trilogy. Instead, a project I thought would take a month ended up sucking me in for several. The emotional burden of many things this year forced myself to give my creativity some grace to let a few things drop from the plan I set forth in January. Still, I managed to be quite productive on the few things that mattered most. Here’s the summary…
2025 YEAR IN REVIEW
The $1,300 Alphabet
While I started The $1,300 Alphabet last year, there was plenty of activity with my illustrator, Nancy Anderson, to get this alphabet book containing $50 words out by the September 29th deadline. This was the one thing that added to everything else I was doing and that I didn’t fully account for in my monthly planning. At least it was the project I enjoyed working on the most. It also helped having Nancy tied to this project as her involvement helped push the pre-orders for the hardcover and paperback versions into numbers I have never seen on any of my other projects. It’s already sitting at my #4 best seller of all my books, and it’s only been out for 3 months. Nancy and I definitely signed a huge stack of hardcovers and paperbacks (see image) to ensure that everyone who ordered a copy got their signed book shortly after it released.
On top of an awesome release, I’ve been submitting this book to a number of different awards like I did for Stop Screaming! a few years ago. It’s already received a 5-star review from Readers’ Favorite, which is always a nice way to kick off awards season. I won’t hear back for many of these submissions until next year, so subscribe to my monthly newsletter to ensure that you’ll be the first to know when it wins something.
Midnight Menagerie (Short Story: “The Physics of Equus Monoceros”)
As I mentioned in January’s “goals” post, this short story was already guaranteed to come out this year. I’m just glad that this story has finally found a home. I’m really proud of it and I think it’s one of my better short stories. It’ll be a few years before it comes to one of my short story collections (like The Ascent of the Writer), so be sure that you pick up a copy if you want to read it. I’ve also submitted it to a few awards as well, so we’ll see how it does next year.
Of course, I have a new goal to write a new short story each year. I’ve written a first draft for a short story that I’ll reveal more information about in next year’s goals post. Now that I have a backlog of ideas, I think I can easily build up more short stories to submit to anthologies like this one so I can potentially have one new original work and one new short story out each year.
Courier to the Stars
I originally intended to do edits on this public domain mash-up in April, but my other personal project sucked up more time than I planned for. I still got around to edits in July, which then pushed my world-building for November’s novel into October. The waterfall effect cut out some of the months where I was going to just relax, which is why I think I’m going to ensure I have fewer projects next year. At the very least, I’m happy where this book is at and I intend to publish it next year on the 150th anniversary of the release of the book it was based on, Michael Strogoff: Courier to the Tsar. While the whole Pride and Prejudice and Zombies style of public domain mash-up hasn’t been as prevalent in recent years, I hope this book keeps to that spirit of punching up an older work by a famous author in a way that will get more people to indirectly read the original story.
Virtuosa
On a lark, I decided to read one of the research books for this project earlier in the year. Unfortunately, I felt so inspired to tell this story that I ended up pushing it to the front of the queue for my November drafts (don’t worry, I’ll get to the “next big thing” soon…ish). While the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) organization folded in April, I still used the structure of the event (my 16th year to participate) to write 53,770 words of this historical fiction biography in November. This was made somewhat easier by the 25 hours of research I accomplished in October to get all the timelines of different events aligned in a way that would allow me to find a few dozen of Clara Schumann’s life events to focus on for this manuscript. I already have a few people interested in beta reading for this book, which is an exciting accomplishment. Another accomplishment I achieved with this novel was crossing over 1 million cumulative words written across the 16 Novembers I’ve been participating in NaNoWriMo. If I stacked all those days of writing back-to-back, it only took me 315 days to do so. Not even a whole year!
Family Project
This was the one thing that ended up taking much more time than I thought. I initially figured it would be just a simple conversion of a cookbook into a slightly different format. Little did I know that it would balloon into three months of edits, tweaks, and polishing. And it’s still not done yet. While there are a lot of great additions and clarifications to this family history, I’ve taken a break from this project until January when I’ll dive into the updates my aunt has made to the current version. The hope is to get it to my extended and immediate family by next year’s family reunion.
Published Works Re-organization
One of the things I did not end up doing this year was getting an online store integrated into my website. This was a casualty of projects that grew in scope, but I did manage a major update to this website to make it easier for people accessing it via mobile phone to use. I haven’t taken a ton of time to learn the new way WordPress puts pages together, but I figured it was time to take advantage of some of these advanced layouts. For each of my books, I have made up little business cards that have QR codes that direct people to that portion of my Published Works page that has details about each of the works I have published over the years. Since I now have 12 books and 6 anthologies, the page got a little unwieldy to edit in the old WordPress format. Now that it’s updated, it has each of the different formats that you can buy listed in a clear section of buttons instead of a bulleted list of links. As a millennial, I had to come to terms with the fact that most people are accessing this website via mobile and not desktop—which is what prompted this change. Now it’s much easier to add in new works as they become available.
Considering how successful I was at conventions this year, this update was likely long overdue. I sold over $2,000 more than my best selling year since I started doing conventions in 2016. This was helped by the awesome Book Bash and Mesa County Library Comic Con events, as well as some of my regular conventions like COSine and Fort Collins Comic Con. I hope to return to most of these next year—personal schedule willing. Be sure to check back on my Events page to see where I’ll be selling books in person.
Reviews
This was another goal this year that I didn’t get as much done on as I wanted. I still have a big backlog of reviews to write and schedule over on BMW the Critic, but it should be fairly transparent to anyone who visits that site regularly. I hope this will be more in focus next year so I can get a larger buffer that will allow me to review things sooner after I finish them.
Miscellanea
Here’s a random listing of various other things that happened this year…
- Joined Linktree and now I have a profile that should help people find the things I want them to when I hand them my card.
- While it’s not an official NaNoWriMo space, I still have a Discord server that many people use to help them write their novels in November (and throughout the year). The group has started meeting in person throughout the year, so if you’re looking to connect in the Colorado Springs region, check it out!
- In non-writing news, I went to Iceland this year to try and see the northern lights (which I did), but got an amazing show in November all the way at the far-off location of the end of my driveway. Go figure.