I haven’t really done a year-in-review before, but here’s my 2025 in review. As I find myself getting a little more time to work on things around the site, I thought I should look back on the year, what I need to do going forward, and how things are going overall.
With my look back, I’m also going to roll back the curtain on some events that changed me and inspired a story I haven’t quite broken out to write yet.
Failures And Lessons
As always, I started the year contemplating how best to advance my writing career. To do that, I felt like I needed to figure out what type of writing I want to do.
Everyone says that to blog and get a following, you need a niche. But I don’t want to be confined to one niche. I want to write what I want to write, though my ultimate goal is to write novels.
I started the year off by giving up on blogging. It felt too hard to post consistently, and I didn’t know how much I wanted to spend on blogging. I want to be a storyteller, and I feel like I need to write books to do that.
To reach that goal, I attempted to expand my short story The Door into a full novel. I set a goal to write 500 words every day, and I did for a couple of months. My story definitely needed a lot of editing, but I enjoyed fleshing it out. It was my take on a story like C.S. Lewis (without the Christian overtones).
I worked on it from January to April, although I didn’t hit 500 words every day. At times during that period, putting words on the page felt impossible, as I was still a stay-at-home dad. My eldest had programs four days a week, five hours at a time. My youngest only had 2 days away. So 2 days a week, I had time to get things done around the house and write. On the other days, I had to find time during naps, which my youngest stopped taking around April.
I gave up. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, but I felt like even if I were to publish my novel, I didn’t have an audience. Instead of giving up completely, I turned to writing more shorts. I wanted to build a fan base and work on skills.
But to build a fan base, you have to actually publish consistently. And that’s why I gave up blogging. For the first four months of the year, I only managed to publish a couple of pieces. I wrote about setting my daily word goals, my short story Elephant Trunks, a review of my Disney Cruise, and the movies to watch before said cruise.
Honestly, I felt so far removed from being an author during this time. I needed some other ideas and goals.
Swindles And Progress
Around April, I reached out on social media, mostly in jest, asking if anyone would like to be my mentor. I had someone who I had corresponded with a few times offer to help me with marketing. I took him up on the offer because anything would help.
This person invited me to a Discord group of others he was “training” and working with. We all came from different backgrounds. This friend looked over everyone’s content and gave us all personalized advice. As someone who has learned most of his marketing skills through trial and error, I found the advice helpful.
Based on the advice, I retooled my methods. Excitement took over at the prospect of finally having a plan. I could make a go of it and use the advice to excel and get my writing out there.
At the same time, I felt I was hitting my stride with short stories. To reach my daily word goal, I spent a lot of time writing shorts. It felt like a great way to get my writing reps in and practice things I hadn’t spent much time on. Plus, finishing stories helps with confidence.
All summer, I talked with my new group. It felt weird that this self-proclaimed expert helped all of these people without any desire for compensation. In fact, he even went through some of my articles and asked me questions about them.
Although one of the first questions he asked me was about a blog post in which I said I had gotten money from a bad crypto investment. It immediately raised the hairs on my neck. He asked me if I wanted to invest in his crypto fund, promising huge returns.
I wasn’t even tempted. In fact, it made me second-guess everything. He never asked me to invest again. He never even asked me for anything. He continued to give me advice and asked me to look over things he wanted to publish as well. It felt like a mutual benefit situation.
I experienced a surge in productivity during this time. I felt so inspired to get these shorts out. I wrote ten short stories, but I was so focused on writing that I never got through the editing process.
I begin getting my productivity organized. I wanted a place to gather all my blog posts and stories from around the internet. I also wanted a visual way to see what I was working on.
I tried Notion to help me get organized based on my new friend’s suggestion. Notion is a great app, but I couldn’t sit down to wrap my mind around it. During this time, I refined my system inside Reminders. This helped me set deadlines and organize my behind-the-scenes stuff.
I wrote one story in my world with Robin, my modern Robin Hood character, where he tricks a businessman and gets all the man’s wealth. It was based on my frustration with the current conditions in the United States. I took the story to beta readers and finished a few drafts.
One day, frustrated, I told my new marketing friend about it, and he encouraged me to share the story with the group for feedback. He read the story and provided some thoughtful feedback, but then he went silent.
After a week of silence, everyone in the group began asking about him. We tried to check on him. A week turned into a month, and we never heard from him. Everyone in the group had theories about where he went, but I’m pretty sure he asked everyone for money, then either ran away or gave up trying to get any from us. In fact, it seems this friend was aserial scammer.
I’ll never know if my story affected him (I’m doubtful it did), but that was the last thing he mentioned in our Discord. After that, I lost much of my inspiration. I didn’t get scammed out of money, but I spent time building a relationship with someone I thought was my friend, only to discover the truth. I doubted every piece of advice he gave me. Most of the advice could have come from anywhere.
It did give me some inspiration for a longer story with Robin, though, tied to my real-life story. Write about what you know, right?
Besides this Robin story, which I will try to edit again and publish next year, I also wrote two stories set in the world of my character Mercury Johnson, which I hope to have edited and published next year.
I also bought a Switch 2, which I reviewed.
Besides my WWDC 25 top features blog post, not much got done in the middle of the year.
Stability and Momentum
I didn’t know what to do. My inspiration for fiction dried up. I thought I might need time to get things going again, but I also didn’t want to force them back.
Then the iPhone 17 Pro came out. I wrote my review of it, and things started to happen. I began to see more views on my website, which filled me with a joy I hadn’t felt in a while.
I followed that with a review of the AirPods Pro 3and the Apple Watch Series 10. That built some momentum I hadn’t seen in a while.
My kids were now in Pre-K programs four days a week, which gave me a few hours a day to myself. With my stats starting to pick up and more time to work, I set out to publish at least one blog a week.
As I close out the year, I have met my goal and published at least one thing a week, even when I didn’t have time during the week, like when I took my family to Disney World. Most of my content has been tech-focused, though I have thrown in a few things about Disney and Star Wars. I’ve also written a few short fiction pieces for holiday contests, which I enjoyed figuring out the story beats. Read my horror story, Knock, Knock , or my Thanksgiving tale, Thanks.
I’m having fun. Blog ideas keep coming to mind, although fiction has been put on the back burner for now. I do have some stories percolating in there, but nothing has bubbled up yet.
Still, I feel like this last part of the year has brought me some wins that I needed. I’m getting more views on my website, which I prefer to a flood of new views and then nothing. I was invited to record my first podcast, and I will be recording another after the holidays. I’m connecting with more people on social media. All of this adds up to make me feel like I’m making progress towards that ultimate goal of writing for a career.
I’ve also started branching out, with my writing getting published. I now have accounts on Medium and Substack if you’d like to keep up there. I post weekly to those sites, but they lag what I publish on the website.
The last few weeks, I feel like I’ve gotten more time to work than I have all year, and I’m taking advantage of it. I’ve finally gotten a bit of a buffer between writing and posting. Instead of writing and posting in one week, I’m writing a week ahead, giving me more time to edit and post.
2025-in-Review Overall
This was an odd year. Like always, I keep waffling on what I want my end goal to be here. I would love to become a novelist or screenwriter, but when I tried to put time into those projects, I felt like I didn’t have anyone to publish to.
It hurt to have made a friend who betrayed my trust in the middle of the year, and I think that’s part of the reason my fictional inspiration has drained a little. However, it has inspired a larger story I want to share one day.
But I ended the year proving to myself that I can do better at this than I thought. I’ve made gains in almost every metric by becoming consistent. I hope to remain consistent as I push forward with my writing in all its aspects.
As the new year begins, I want to set some goals I can measure at the end of the year to track my growth even more.
Now, if you’ve made it this far, I would love to hear something you’ve found on the site. I could use the encouragement so I don’t give up again.
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