2025 Wrapped & Stats
It’s that time of the year when everyone and their sister is sharing highlights and reflections and memories of a year that’s rapidly wrapping up—and I’m not about to take an original route and do something else with this very last blog post of 2025. These past twelve months have been extremely full and a little all over the place, so let me consolidate and see if I can’t leave ya with the key points.
I know I’ve said this elsewhere on this blog, but this is the first year I’ve been allowed to devote as much time as I’d like to my writing. My husband has been nothing but encouraging in my creative endeavors, and I’m very fortunate we’ve been in a position for me to take advantage of the time. Knowing I could be consistent, I set a goal, at the beginning of the year, to write 7,500 words a week, which broke down to 1,500 words over the course of five days. I made myself a nice spreadsheet to track my progress, incorporating a color code to indicate which days I met my goal and which days I didn’t.
That number I picked wasn’t based on any advice or guideline. I thought, “Let’s try it, see how it goes, and adapt from there.” What I ended up noticing was that, despite good intentions, some weeks I was in the green (meeting goals) and some weeks I was in the red (not quite getting there). Creative energy ebbs and flows, life makes more demands on you, and we ended up hosting a handful of visitors. What I noticed was that aiming for a specific number didn’t keep me from being human—and that’s okay.
By the last quarter of this year, I lowered my goal to 5,000 words a week (so, 1,000 words over five days) because I knew lots of change and motion were headed our way. If you missed it, my husband and I had been living in Germany, but we moved back to the States in November. That meant the fall was saturated with tasks related to such a big move and all that entails. I was exhausted from all that and then more so by the travel. There was a lot of time spent being unsettled and in transition, and, I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a ton of energy for my creative projects in seasons like that.
I’m incredibly pleased, though, and proud of all the writing I’ve been able to do this year. At the time of this posting, I’ve written 231,056 words towards my manuscript projects and 42,167 words for this blog.
Those numbers are rather abstract, as far as what they signify. What does it really mean that I’ve written that much? What does that look like?
We’ll start with this blog. I launched my blog beginning of February and, since then, I’ve written 34 posts, and I only ended up missing one or two weeks. On weeks I wasn’t making a post, I was sharing a short story, and I ended up writing 10 short stories. Short stories used to be primarily what I focused on, as that’s usually what I was required to submit for assignments in my undergrad creative writing courses. After graduating, I focused more on novel-length pieces, so it’d been a minute since choosing to do the shorter format. Now I’ve got ten fresh stories to be editing and revising thanks to my progress this year.
We’ll take a look next at my manuscript projects. I’ve been working on my “Classics Project” since 2019, but, thanks to the ground I’ve been able to cover this year, I should be able to finish it up by the end of the first quarter of 2026. This year I wrote the majority of the one-page reviews each “Classic” book gets, and I read 31 titles on the list of those still yet to be conquered. Additionally, I’ve done more literary journaling for this project than I have in past years, been able to sit with and elaborate on bigger themes and ideas of reading/literature.
In terms of fiction, my primary focus was on my Pirate Tales. Going into this year, I had one completed draft of the first tale and about half of the second one. I love that I now have drafts of Tales 1-6, with No. 7 being about a third of the way through. Each tale is about 15,000 words (some a little more), and I’m working my way towards ten tales total. To see so much movement forward on this project has been a lot of fun and a great way to measure how much I’ve been able to get done.
My final mark of achievement for 2025 is something of a pivot because it’s not writing related. I simply have to chat, though, about launching a podcast—The Nemesis Files—with my long-time literary bud, Tim. There’ve been a few times in the past we’ve joked about starting a podcast where we chat books, but this year, when it came up again, it wasn’t a joke. We’ve both been able to commit the time, and—a huge factor for how we can do this—my husband has been so generous with lending us his editing skills. Being a podcaster has come with a learning curve for sure, but we were able to put out 17 episodes on Spotify and have more in the works for 2026.
All this, of course, is part of the 2025 Highlight Reel, and it’s definitely not looking too closely at the days I sat at my desk frustrated that I didn’t seem to know what to write. It doesn’t factor in the weeks when I felt like I needed to be writing, was too tired from or busy with life, and needed a gentle reminder that it’s okay (and necessary) to take breaks. It has not been a perfect year, yet it is enough that it has been good.
Going into the new year, I have some changes I’ll be implementing regarding my weekly word goal and how I track that, and I intend to be more active in querying agents as well as submitting my pieces to magazines. Also, now that I’m back in the States and it’s easier for me to find volunteering opportunities in my community, my weeks are going to include those, and I’ll have to see how that impacts my writing routine. All this I’m going more in-depth about in a January post, so I won’t say too much now. I gotta finish setting up my new spreadsheet before anything else, anyway!
I’ll leave you here for now, my friend, and I hope that you, too, can celebrate your year’s wins and joys. Here’s to 2026 being another year of spending time with the stories you love (and possibly write!), the people you adore, and the dreams you’re trying to achieve!