We made it. Dear God, we made it. I wish my arms were long enough to give everyone a group hug, including you, dear reader. I know this is a month late; the way the year started gave me serious reason to reconsider everything I had vowed to do.

Let’s get the hard stuff out of the way. 2025 was disappointing to me. I didn’t place any stories in magazines. I had to step away from yet another editor for Perceiver 2, delaying publication again. I also felt that writing was not sustaining me the way it used to. More on that in the yearly essay at the end. The point is, I perceived this year to be a bad one, and I dragged my feet on compiling my reading and writing data, anticipating that I had done even less reading and writing than ever before.

But then I compiled the data.

The Data

Overall

I wrote, read, and revised a total of 892.25 hours. I did more writing and reading this year than I did last year! So close to 900, so short of 1,000, which was my goal.

Projects

As usual, reading took the top spot. Perceiver 2 takes second place, again, and the sequel, Perceiver 3, takes fourth. Writing in my diary, of course, is self-explanatory.

Submissions

As of December 29th, I’ve sent 43 submissions of poetry, short stories, and a novella to different outlets. Of these, 11 are still pending a response. The other 32 are rejections, 9 personal. Since beginning to track my submissions in 2017, this is the second highest number of submissions I’ve sent in a year. It’s also the highest number of personal rejections I’ve received for my stories.

More on why these numbers excite me. For those who aren’t writers, magazines for poetry, fiction, etc typically have tiers of rejections. The bottom rung is the standard boilerplate: “Thanks but no thanks” in essence. The next rung is nicer: “We really liked your submission, but we couldn’t take it this time. But definitely send us something else.” The highest rung is personalized, such as this one that I received, “Thank you for your patience. Your story made it to the second round for consideration, but ultimately, our editorial team decided against accepting it. This reading period was very competitive, so I hope you won’t be too discouraged. We look forward to future stories from you.”

Magazines receive hundreds, if not thousands of submissions per year. I used to be a reader for a literary journal in high school that received over a thousand (!) submissions per reading cycle. When we asked for more work, we meant it. We rarely asked. Less than 1% of submissions were accepted; a little more than 1% of submitters were asked to send more work. That I got 9 personal rejections out of 32 total across different magazines is extremely promising. I hope that at least one of the 11 pending submissions will result in an acceptance next year.

Et Cetera

There were more unexpected successes this year that the data doesn’t capture.

I signed a contract with a new editor! She should return her comments on the sequel to Perceiver in the new year.
I joined a new writing group, and I love them. I’m not the only one submitting my writing, and many of them have been published. I’ve learned a lot from them. Not just great feedback for my work, but new markets, publishing industry news, and more.
I was asked to read a story at Tulsa Lit Fest! There was a small reading for horror writers. I typically don’t write horror, but I had one small story that fit the bill, and I was able to share it with an audience.
This year I started submitting poetry. I’ve always loved reading it; I’ve had a subscription to Poetry Magazine for years. But only this year have I started regularly writing it and submitting it.

2025 Resolutions

Finish the current draft of Perceiver 2 and send it to beta readers. Concrete goal: Work on it every day until it’s sent off. Done!
Finish another draft of P3. Concrete goal: once P2 is off to beta-readers, work on P3 every day. Nope. I actually started writing P3 over again for the third time. The good news is, I’m halfway through a new draft, and I feel like I’ve found my groove.
Try to write, read, or revise at least 2.75 hours per day. Nope. My daily average was just a hair under 2.5 hours a day.
Three pages every day. I didn’t explicitly make this a resolution because I’ve done it for so long that I think it goes without saying. But I did it! Fourteen years strong!

2026 Resolutions

I want to stay ambitious, open, and disciplined, take my current projects to the finish line while experimenting on the side. I’ve tried to make my resolutions specific and concrete while allowing room to experiment, making them within reach while also stretching myself.

Publish P2! Once I receive comments back from the editor, things should heat up quickly. I still need to reserve the cover artist.
Finish the current draft of P3, and do one complete revision pass. I don’t think I’ll have time this year to do more.
52 TikTok videos, at least one per week. I was wrong when I thought TikTok was going away. It’s too lucrative and useful for corporations to vanquish entirely. This year, I’d like to experiment with length and style, plus continue my reviews on books on writing and storytelling and market my writing.
Three pages every day. Gotta go fifteen years.
2.75 hours a day of writing, reading, etc. But I fell short in 2025! Why try again? The attempt to reach this goal was, I think, why I was able to surpass 2024’s writing numbers. I’d like to try again.
STOP journaling. I’ve never had a resolution to stop doing something, so I’m not sure how it will go. Long story short, I feel like writing in my diary has replaced working on my stories, essays, etc for repetitive, self-absorbed worrying. Because I have a ton of tiny journals left, I’ll probably use them to write scripts for TikTok, blog posts, or poetry. Or maybe I’ll give them away. Who knows.

The Problem with Summarizing

I’m writing this without first compiling the data. I’m guessing that I have done even less writing and reading than ever before. I’m feeling the annual questions—keep writing? —press into my temple.

Whining (You Can Skip This Section)

I typically start drafting my End of Year Review Thanksgiving Break, when I have my first long vacation at home with Mom—home in Claremore, OK, where the internet is patchy and the TV is stuck on one channel. It’s here that I remember how little there is to do here. Nowhere is walking distance. No bookstores or late night cafes. The gym is 10 miles away on the opposite side of town, and the library, at the other end. I have kept up with none of my friends from high school. I am reverting back to how I was when I was in middle school and high school, complete with wishing I could go somewhere, do something. I walk, run, daydream, read, write.

In the house, I realized that writing no longer moves me, drives me, the way it used to. When I was a kid, reading and writing got me out of my bedroom and into the world. Now that I’m in the world, the world and its problems are constantly in my head.

I’m not blind, and neither are you, so let’s get this out of the way: I’m sickened and shocked by the Trump administration’s cruelty. I didn’t think the second term could be worse than the first, but if there’s such a thing as a genius of depravity and greed, it’s our sitting president. I’ve tried to make my politics implicit in my writing rather than explicit, because I, like many others, am bored by preaching. I like reading stories that show characters evolving in their thinking and feeling about the world; I try to write those characters and stories. But America has twice elected a leader whose character has, by his own admission, been unchanged since first grade. It makes me wonder whether writing is a meaningful way to push back, let alone sustain me enough to do other meaningful things.

This year, hobbies that sustained me were those that got me outside and used a different part of my brain: cycling and pottery. Both require a level of body awareness that, if done properly, obliviates thinking. My body, flying along the trail. My hands, unmoving, clay shaped by their position above a wheel. It’s easy to stay in your own head when you’re trapped in a bedroom, either by holiday tradition or because you work remotely, as I do.

Writing is thought. Why go back to my cage at the end of the day? Before the break, I considered stopping writing entirely.

Rallying (You Can Start Reading Here Again)

Then I compiled the data, and I did better than I thought. I took stock of the year, and lay in my childhood bed propped up by pillows, with my planner and notebooks strewn around me. I finished reading some books, drank a lot of tea and a little wine, and slept in. When I felt much improved, I thought again about the year.

The weariness prior to the break was real, and it lingers, even now. Though I no longer feel that it is fatal to my writing habit, I know I will need to do something different in 2026.

So let’s look back again. What sustained me in 2025? Most of the media that moved me the most this year were surreal in some way, such as Uncertain Sons, ENA: Dream BBQ, and Twin Peaks. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’ve been more drawn to it; surrealism rose with WW1 and peaked during WW2. Surrealism also satisfies the need for emotional resonance without needing to explain or untangle feelings, which could be dangerous. But personally, I feel like I’ve found my niche. While reading or watching surrealist stories, I would often think to myself, this is what I’ve been trying to do with my stories.

Conflictingly, I have also enjoyed books about moral clarity, such as One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This, the Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates interview, Tony Kushner’s play, A Bright Room Called Day. Extremely different genres. Moral clarity satisfies that need for explanation, reaffirmation, and direction. They offer direction on how to live now, when everything seems to be anti-life. This direction, this clarity, is also something I’m trying to do with my work. Speaking of clarity, I think I really, really needed that break.

I’ve lived long enough to know that we are not ever done growing up. And once more, I am having growing pains. The world I once recognized is warping, perhaps irreparably. Mass protests, illegal detentions, the most vulnerable denied protection, justice, and healing. The hair stands on the back of my neck. Look away, run away! But I can’t blink. Greater than the urge to flee is the need to understand, to undo, and act. What do I do with these conflicting desires?

Easy: reconsider what I want my writing to achieve.

Hard: actually write something that achieves that.

Perceiver

Publishing Perceiver 2 will be the biggest goal this year—the story is mostly crystallized. So now my writerly focus will be on Perceiver 3. It isn’t radically different from P1 and P2, but I’ve realized that the way I wrote the prior books will not support the vision I have for the series. I and the world have changed so much since I started writing, that I wonder how P3 can possibly work with the series as it is.

The first book was based on the portal fantasies of my childhood: a straight-forward adventure story to save parents and neighbors, with magic, in a rich and interesting world. The protagonist, Hattie, is naive, determined, smart, but sometimes too smart for her own good. The end cuts her off from that childhood where she thought she was innocent and capable and pulls back a curtain on her family’s history with Tsava. The story is for me. It has all the things I liked when I was Hattie’s age, and if any other readers liked it, that was not intentional.

The second book matures the series. Hattie’s mission is not over, and she needs power to complete it. The story in the second book has the political intrigue and rebellion found in the young adult series I enjoyed when I was her age, but also the joy of learning and growing that Hattie was denied in the first book—even though the learning and growing is in a direction nurtured by people with different intentions than hers. It was rewritten heavily during 2024 and 2025, and reflects a push-pull of hope and despair. It also ends with a cataclysm which might physically destroy the world of Tsava.

The third book ties it together. The world is too large to be saved by a single person, let alone a teenager. But it’s Hattie’s story. What is her role in this? I won’t give too many spoilers. There aren’t any to give. This is the third first draft (!) I’ve written since starting the series in 2016. The final book in Hattie’s tale will only work by allowing it to be shaped by my changing understanding of the world, how the world changes, and how we share it with each other. It’s an exciting challenge to pull together all the things I’ve learned and spin them into a gripping story that is honest and clear without being sentimental or soft about what’s needed to change the world… AND caps off the series I’ve been writing since I was Hattie’s age. I can’t stick to the outline I wrote when I was a teenager—that would mean ignoring 15 years of learning and growing. And if that means discarding another manuscript and rewriting afresh, I’m fine with that. If that means writing through another year, that’s okay too. If I quit now, then I won’t get to see how it ends.

End

The Year in Review has always been a time to remember, deliberately, the things I had overlooked during the living of the year. Summing it up usually feels impossible until you’ve done it, much like the finale in a trilogy you’ve worked on for more than a decade. So I say to myself, and you, if our ears still work: Get a grip, grow up, look beyond what’s behind your eyes, and fix your heart, or die.

Despite everything, I’m still excited to see what 2026 brings.