2025 in Review

2025 wasn’t about volume. It was about depth. While I didn’t write as much as I wanted to, I thought and reflected in a way that helped me improve as both a writer and a human.

The Fiction

PODs arrived in July – a science fiction story about identity, consciousness, parenting, and what makes us human when technology blurs every boundary we thought was solid. I followed it with two companion essays documenting the craft decisions behind it: how I built the world, how I edited 8,000 words down to precision, and what I learned about pacing and emotional payoff. This transparency – showing the work behind the work – matters as much as the story itself. I will continue to do this going forward with new published work.

The Dreams

I’ve always had terrifying dreams, but never thought to analyze them. To start applying these ideas to my writing, I wrote two nightmare essays later in the year. The Dungeon in September explored recurring horror and sleep paralysis. Shoes in the Ceiling in December went further, examining not just the nightmares themselves, but the disturbing realization that I’m conducting them. That I’m both victim and architect of my own terror.

This wasn’t fiction, but rather documentation of something real and unsettling about consciousness, about how our sleeping minds create precisely calibrated horror even when we’re aware it’s happening.

The Analysis

On Productivity and Too Many Projects confronted the tension between wanting to create everything and needing to finish anything. I asked myself uncomfortable questions about craft, ambition, and the gap between what we want to create and what we actually have time and focus to build.

What Changed

Subconsciously, 2025 was the year I stopped treating this site as a portfolio and started treating it as a practice. Every post – fiction, craft essay, dream documentation – served a single purpose: examining what happens when we push past the familiar and venture into territory that unsettles us. My fiction explores cosmic horror and identity collapse. My dreams document psychological horror we can’t control. All of it operates in the space between the known and the unknown. All of it asks: What happens when certainty dissolves?

What’s Next

I’m putting the final touches on a new short story, The Third Gale, in a format I haven’t tried before, as well as a new story universe outside science fiction.

More stories are coming, and I intend to submit more this year for publication. These new ideas I would not have been able to write prior to now as I didn’t have the skill or life experience to articulate them and execute well. I also didn’t have my core theme identified that sets my writing apart. (I’ll write more on this later.)

I hope you’ll continue following me further into the dark. But don’t worry. My writing will show you the way.