My 2025 in Review

2025 has been a rough year, both globally and personally. We had Trump tearing up our economy here in the United States (and making it everyone else’s problem), but that was also personally aligned with things like dealing with the repercussions of a move late in 2024 and trying to slowly but surely do better by myself.

So lets get to the good, the bad, and the ugly of 2025 (at least for me as an author).

The Good

Here’s a list of things I accomplished in 2025:

• YouTube Videos
  • Fated Mates of the Drakoan Book Launch Party
  • Catching Up Livestream
  • Livestream on recent AI cases
• Subscription
  • Posted 12 spicy short stories
  • Posted 21 chapters in Matched to the Alien King
  • Posted 25 episodes in Fated Mates of the Drakoan Season 2
  • Sent an eBook copy (with bonus epilogue) to eBook Lovers
• New Publishing
  • Published Fated Mates of the Drakoan Season 1
• Publishing Wide
  • Published Matched to the Alien Prince
  • Published Mila’s Shift
  • Published Shifting Cargo
• Other Publishing Related
  • Started working on getting Matched to the Alien Workaholic ready for publication
  • Started working on editing Matched to the Alien Captain
  • Participated in a StoryBundle
• Social Media & Marketing
  • Started posting more on BlueSky
  • Started creating evergreen posts for my books and brand
  • Set up on Cravebooks, romance.io, and Bingebooks
  • Started setting up Sendy for mailing list management (just need to set up email templates now)
• Diversity in Romance
  • Started working on website
  • Started planning structure and goals
• Continuing Education
  • Learned basics of Affinity Suite (and unsubscribed from Photoshop)
  • Learned basics of Davinci Resolve
  • Attended marketing strategy webinar

Most of that is pretty self-explanatory (and I’m pretty impressed by the length of the list), but I thought I would clarify on one thing: Diversity in Romance. This is a venture that I’m wanting to start up. At first, I’m thinking it will just be a website and blog, but will expand from there. The entire premise is “Building Empathy Through Story,” specifically through romance stories, by highlighting and promoting authors who put a focus on characters from diverse experiences and backgrounds.

This has been something that has been a part of my writing from the start, from the moment I put a trans side character in Mila’s Shift. Representation is important, and after reading books like Wired for Story by Lisa Cron, I can’t stress how much more important it has become to me.

We are experiencing a devastating lack of empathy in this country right now (and in a lot of places around the world), and I know I can’t do anything meaningful to fix it. I’m just one small person barely keeping their head above water, but maybe I can curate a space that helps little by little.

That’s what I want to do.

The Bad

2025 probably had the worst launch I’ve ever experienced. There’s a lot of reasons this might have been. The book is offered as a serial, so people can find a version of it for free (not quite the same version, but a version). I’m not sure I did as many mailing list swaps as I’ve done in the past. I didn’t do any paid advertising. This was my first book launch that wasn’t in KU. You name it. I don’t know. I just know that the total earnings so far didn’t equal the initial print sales of Shifting Shadows, which didn’t land well because it was sapphic and the rest of my books so far are MF.

I had a really hard time getting as much done as I wanted to this year. I don’t think I reached a single one of my goals for 2025, either. I’m pretty bad about setting unachievable goals, but I didn’t think any of the goals were unachievable, and I feel like I’d toned down my goals to be more manageable, but apparently not.

In theory, if I was dedicating the time I would want to my writing, I would be averaging about 24 hrs per month with maybe the occasional bonus of a few extra hours on my off days, but looking back, far too many of those months were more like 15, 16, 17, even one that was only about 6.5.

I’m a part-time author, so I don’t expect those numbers to be too huge, though it is less than last year, and a little over half of some of my previous years when I was pushing myself too hard and burning out.

I know why this was, to a certain extent. I moved in November of 2024, and I’ve spent a significant amount of the last year working on projects around the house. Sometimes it was stuff I was doing myself, sometimes it was coordinating contractors or services, sometimes it was just suffering through the upheavals the projects inevitably caused. By the end of April, I put a hold on most of it just so I could get some decent sleep for once. There were also a lot of times where I didn’t have the motivation, mental clarity, or ability to sit down and get the work done.

The Ugly

As I said above, I suffered some physical and mental health issues in 2025. On the physical side, there were some times throughout the year when I just couldn’t sit at a desk for any length of time. It made writing hard, and made me come to the realization that I really did need to get a new laptop so I could work from the couch from time to time. My tablet just wasn’t cutting it. I also suffered quite a few of what I suspect were migraines, mostly during winter and early spring. These can make my brain foggy and not want to cooperate. On rare occasions, it can take me out of commission for the day, even with medication.

On the mental health side, I suffered one of the worst winters on record for me. I suspect I’m prone to Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), which makes sense considering where I live and my work schedule. I often had it where I would need a nap in the middle of the day, or would be dead tired by 9 PM (less than twelve hours after getting up and well before my work day ended). I’ve never been like that before, and it was alarming. It also came with a level of apathy and lack of motivation so severe it was impossible to mistake it for just “autism.” And a lot of the solutions I found online just didn’t work. Light therapy gave me headaches (apparently it’s not recommended for people with migraines), and how are you supposed to exercise when you can’t even put together the motivation for fun activities?

In the summer, I started to suspect I had mild depression, but I was fortunate enough that an impromptu decision to quick caffeine seemed to fix that. It’s weird, since all the research I did seemed to indicate that caffeine could improve depression symptoms, but I suspect I was addicted, even if I didn’t have any of the obvious signs. I suspect that the natural production of neurotransmitters affected by caffeine were depressed and quitting caffeine forced me to slowly start building up my normal supply. Now, I only consume caffeine in the form of chocolate (nobody’s stealing my chocolate from me). I’m hoping it might also help with the migraines and maybe even the SAD.

I want to do better in the new year.

The New Year

There’s a lot of things I’m trying to do, like be kinder to myself, not set my expectations so high, etc. I’ve been trying to avoid using the word “should” when thinking about myself because I realized how I tended to use it to judge myself for not being “enough.” I’m trying to organize my time so I always have time for writing, editing, marketing, and preparing books for launch.

All of that is still a work in progress, and I hope I get better. I hope I start getting more hours in consistently. I hope I can be more consistent about being kind to myself. I hope that it won’t feel like a new disaster has struck the world around me every ten seconds.

Here’s hoping 2026 gives us more to look forward to.

2026 Goals

• Publish 2 Books Wide
• Publish 2 New Books
• Migrate Mailing List to Sendy
• Continue Diversifying Income Streams
  • Set up Itch.io
• Build an Evergreen/Compounding Marketing Strategy
  • Posting more regularly to Tumblr
  • Upload to Scribblehub
  • Build/Expand Autolists on Metricool
• Set up Diversity in Romance website and start sharing.