It's that time of year again: Every new year I write up an annual review of what happened in the past year. All of these posts going back to the 2010s are available on my blog under the tag annual review.

2024 did not start off well for me because Amy (my wife) was dealing with a sudden and severe health issue. It was not only frightening and painful but caused us to up-end our lives for months. So, a year ago I was not feeling especially optimistic.

I had goals to continue working on my next novel, TG, but it was really difficult to make any real progress. I discovered that I just couldn't write a novel in the one or two hours per week that I had available to me. I needed long stretches of time for this, and long stretches of time did not exist. However, before I could get too depressed about this, something else happened that I did not expect at all. I started writing poetry again. This actually could be done in the one or two hours per week that I had at the time.

Let me assure you, this poetry was not great at first. I haven't written poetry since I was in my early 20s, and I'm not sure I was really great at it then, either. But I'm a lot more experienced now as a writer, and I'm not deterred by bad first drafts anymore. I kept at it, and more and more poetry emerged. I have now written an entire book of poetry in the past year — something I never thought I would ever do.

So far, there's nothing to show you. But I'm hoping that later this year I will be able to tell you more about what this is turning out to be. I'm also hoping that I'll be able to finish this new thing this year and finally get back to work on TG.

At this point, this new thing can no longer be done in one or two-hour chunks; I now need long stretches of time to work on it. But thankfully, because Amy is well on her way to recovery, I also have more time again. It's become clear to me that I need to cut out everything I don't absolutely need to do in order to make enough time for writing. Here's to making even more time in 2025!

From 2024 to 2025

KEY MOMENTS FROM MY 2024