2025 was a rough year in pretty much every way that wasn’t writing-related. On a national scale, things were (and continue to be) a giant dumpster fire. There are bright spots here and there across the country, but largely things are going about as badly as could be expected given the administration in power.
On a personal scale, this year felt like I was careening from one emergency to another. Nevertheless, I managed to do more writing than I have in any one year prior to this, and I’m very happy with the stories I produced. Here’s a recap of 2025’s personal challenges and successes.
Challenges
The local supply of firewood on a family member’s property has been exhausted, leaving that person without a source of heating fuel. (In rural Alaska, where heating oil is prohibitively expensive to haul in and natural gas is unavailable, a lot of households still heat with wood.) This led me to enlist a friend and embark on a massive firewood hauling project to make sure that person was set up with enough firewood this winter. We spent our weekends from February through April cutting and splitting wood, stacking it to dry over the summer.
In my 2024 recap, I mention my friend’s efforts to clean up a derelict property. This summer he started building a cabin on it. Then, in June, he discovered some epic real estate fuckery that was conspiring to steal his property out from under him. (If you’d like to read about exactly what happened and what we did about it, you can read a detailed post here.) Long story short, after about three months of stress and a massive amount of work and expense, we managed to save his property.
With the arrival of fall, it was time to deliver the now-seasoned firewood. In keeping with the rest of the year, even that couldn’t happen without several disastrous setbacks and breakdowns that collectively cost me about five grand in repairs. However, considering the long spell of -35 to -50 Fahrenheit temperatures that stretched through December and early January, it’s a good thing we accomplished that.
Writing Progress
Most of my big accomplishments this year were writing related. In addition to marking a full of year of posting regularly on Patreon, I wrapped up the Iceball Planet story arc and book one of Frank the Tank. These were the projects I was working on when burnout and the demands of yet another 80-hour-per-week job forced me to take a break. I’m pretty happy with how those projects concluded, and with everything else I’ve written since I came back.
Those include Mica’s Storm and Schrödinger’s Carrier, stories I’ve been plotting for the better part of a decade. It felt really good to finally get these fleshed out and on paper, a bit of fulfilling an old promise to myself. It was also great therapy, as the Iceball Planet stories are inspired by my time at the cargo airline from hell and Schrödinger’s Carrier is partially inspired by the nearly a decade I spent as a FedEx driver.
Toward the end of 2025, I started writing The Ferret’s Tale, a sword-and-sorcery style fantasy adventure about Leric, a cursed ferret trying to get his human body back, and the friends he meets along the way. These include Vlad, a warrior on a quest for justice, who has the crown prince’s head in a bag; an undead warhorse named Destroyer; and Harold, a lad who says he’s on his way to the capital to enlist, but isn’t what he seems.
The Ferret’s Tale is a bit more lighthearted than what I usually write, but still touches on the realities of a feudal system run by a selfish, greedy monarchy, a host of petty lords, and a church that wields the power to have almost anyone tried for heresy and killed. The story also includes ancient forests, old gods, women in lakes distributing swords, and main character LGBTQ representation.
If you’d like to check out any of what I wrote in 2025 or am writing now, you can find it all in this handy Table of Contents post.
2026 Goals
This year I want to return to posting book reviews, writing news, and general commentary on my blog– something which had to take a back seat in 2025. I also want to finish The Ferret’s Tale, and start one or more of the other big projects I have in the works, like book two of Frank the Tank, A Body For Layla, or Necrotic Insurgency. I hope you’re looking forward to all of that as much as I am!
