Happy New Year!
I hope everyone has enjoyed whatever holidays they celebrate, and I assume one of those to have been the New Year. May your 2026 get off to a great start and just keep rolling.
News
On that note, let’s get the start of my 2026 out of the way. I am currently job free. The project I was supporting lost funding as of Dec 29, 2025 and I did not get picked up by another team within my contracting company. I am lucky in that I do not have to immediately panic. Realistically, I doubt that I can retire to writing and risk our mortgage and health insurance to the whims of the publishing — even the self-publishing — industry. I will probably need to find a job. But does it have to be a 40 hour per week job? I had managed to cut my hours back to 32 on my last contract, so such opportunities are not impossible, though they may be rare. In any event, I do have the luxury of taking at least a little time to think and investigate some options.
Writing & other stuff
The 0-draft of the novel plods along, but so long as it doesn’t come to a complete stop, I’m satisfied. Since I like short fiction so much, I’ve had some unruly thoughts lately about writing a new short story, or doing something wonky like writing a bunch of flash fiction scenes and trying to fashion them into this part of the novel I’m working on. Each chapter a piece of flash? I think the pacing that implies would be far too frenetic, but they could provided a basis for me to build off of.
In January though, I’m going easy on the writing and focusing on my Spanish study, which I am enormously frustrated with, and with the game I’ll be running in February for my beloved’s birthday. Or, you know, looking for work. Or fleeing the country. One never knows what’s around the next corner!
2025 in review
Wonderful things happened to me in 2025. I traveled outside the U.S. for the first time and it was fantastic. I was able to cut back on my work hours, when I had a job, and it was fantastic. However, I also lost a lot of the year to depression, largely due to my irrational reluctance to increase my medication dosage. Come to find out, you often don’t think clearly when you’re depressed. So, much of the year before the trip is kind of a blur to me, to be honest. I know I’ve been obsessed with Baldur’s Gate 3 all year, and thank goodness for that. It gave me something to disappear into. I think I might have written a story or two, but I’d have to double check to be sure; maybe I wrote them in 2024. I am sure that I mostly kept up with my co-writing dates, so I was at least typing words. But, it’s all water under the bridge now. No point in dwelling on lost time, when there’s a finite amount of it left in front of me. Best to do what I can to make the most of that.
¡Ciao!