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2024 Recap and 2025 Goals

View of a sunrise from a balcony over a city
View from our hotel in Paris

2024 was a hectic year. A lot of wonderful things happened, but I am very excited to see it end and to start fresh in 2025. This year we spent 21 weekends away from home (compared to 24 in 2023); but of those, only 4 were spend traveling (to Carbondale to see the eclipse; DC and Virginia for a work trip and staycation with a wonderful friend, Wisconsin with my family, and a whirlwind 9-day eurotrip honeymoon redo). Those trips don't come close to the 11 places I visited last year. One writing-related highlight to the last trip is that I got to meet 2 more of my writing group members in person, when 4 of us all coincidentally converged on London at the same time!  

The largest reason for all the travel this year was... we moved! The process of buying a new house, selling the old one, and moving between the two included 8 round-trips between them over 3 exhausting months, on top of the endless rounds of paperwork and hours on the phone with our various real estate agents. Now we're settled into the new house, the old house is no longer our concern, and best of all, it only takes us 25 minutes to see family and friends rather than 3 hours! No longer do we need an entire day to recover from the exhaustion of visiting home! While it is definitely an adjustment to have a social life again, I am so excited to spend 2025 in our home. 

Finally, as I reflect on 2024, the biggest takeaway seems to be that February, March, May, and the fever dream that was all of September through December were each "the busiest work month I've ever had." It is impossible to have an active writing life when I'm logging on to work at 6:30 and working straight past dinner. Full-stop. I'm not quite sure what work will look like in 2025, but I know that I need a change of some sort. Luckily I have a very supportive manager, so I am hopeful that with some hard choices I can find a way to carve back my personal life. 

With all of that going on, my writing life definitely looked different compared to teh very steady routine I'd established from 2020-2023. 

2024 Writing Goals:

  1. 👍 Revamp and continue querying Garden Party. I started querying Garden party early in 2024, and by the summer had mostly run through my list of agents. I ended up with a few full requests, all of which are still outstanding, and overall I am really happy with how this process went this year. 
  2. 👍 Finish Predacide and send to betas. I officially finished the full draft of Predacide in July, and sent it to 8 beta readers. I received feedback from 4 of those betas, which gave me a decent amount of information to build a revision plan from. I also took the opening of Predacide to Futurescapes, and got a ton of excellent feedback from my group. Since then, I did one full round of revision, and while I am feeling very positive about beginning to query, I want to take one more pass on it before I begin sending it out. 
  3. 👎 Beta read 6 books. I only beta read 4 books this year; and when counting non-full manuscripts that I read for friends, I only hit half of the total words compared to last year (356,000). I don't have a good excuse for missing the mark on this goal.  
  4. 💭 Develop my voice. I suppose this one is my fault for including an unquantifiable goal. On one hand, I continued to receive feedback on common themes and reader experiences from my work. On the other, I really didn't do as much writing as I would have liked to this year, so it is hard to say that I really gave myself as full of an opportunity to develop my voice as I could have. I'm going to leave this goal open-ended. I don't think I achieved it, but by being mindful of it I do think I made some progress. 
When I look back at my year of writing, I spent a lot of time this year percolating on ideas, but really only put pen to paper for Predacide. From January to December, I wrote 91,600 words of Predacide over 3 main drafts (mostly from January-March; May-July, and November-December). I spent August, September, and December journalling on a new project, Beekeeper. That's it! There weren't any new short stories or fresh ideas that I felt drawn to put on the page this year. 

The biggest lesson for 2024 has been that I can't create from an empty well. I can't pull ideas down from the cloud of Art when I don't have a moment to breathe. And honestly, that's okay! We made a lot of big changes this year, and although the hours sucked, I grew a lot professionally in a way that I hope will allow me more opportunities to choose how I focus my work days this year. But. In order to have an active writing life, I need to make time for it. 

And despite how little I wrote this year, each time I've reread my work through the process of editing, I've been pleasantly surprised that I like what I've written. What a joy that is, to be pleased by your own creation! So although it was a challenge to carve out time to write this year, the other big lesson was that fighting for time to write is worth it. Those moments of shock when I read something beautiful that I dreamed to life, the times when drafting feels like bliss. That's what it's all for. 

With all of that in mind, here are my 2025 Writing Goals: 
  1. Finish and query Predacide. I think it will be reasonable to complete this goal in the first half of the year. I just need a bit more distance from the book before I do what hopefully is the final pass on it. 
  2. Draft Beekeeper. I first wrote Beekeeper as a short story in April 2023. I knew the ending wasn't right, but I adored the world and the characters that populated it. In the year and a half since then, I've continued to dream about the world and its people, and I have a solid synopsis that I plan to draft out in the coming months. 
  3. Beta read 4 books. Continuing to keep my goal of being a good community member, but lowering the threshold that I didn't meet this year. 
  4. Generate 2 new ideas that excite me. This goal feels a little nebulous, but I think if I take the lessons from last year I can meet it. To do this I'll need to create space in my life for writing; to fill my well; and to keep a practice of creativity going. I'm not going to specify right now whether this means holding time for short stories, or mandating any other type of form for this goal. I need to create time, and use it purposefully. 

Baby deer standing in suburban shrubbery
Deer spotted a block from our house, on one of my last walks before we moved

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