2025: Same and different

So. 2025: one quarter of the way through the 21st century. For someone born in the second half of the 20th century that is… Well, it’s hard to wrap my head around.

What will 2025 hold? I have no idea! Lots of bad things, of course: climate crisis and chaos, political crisis and chaos, environmental crisis and chaos. But none of that is new. Perhaps some unknown unknown: a brand new pandemic; a paroxysmal convulsion from the Cascadia Subduction Zone sending Western Washington into the sea; asteroids from another dimension. Who knows. Some incredible story of human heroism? Undoubtedly—that happens every day, somewhere. Some stunning biomedical breakthrough that will change lives for the better? Absolutely—that, too, is happening every day. (Really, 2024 was a banner year.)

Where I’m going with this is that no one knows what new things will arise but we all know many of the same-old, same-olds that will be with us, good and bad. It’s just a question of how we handle it all.

For me, personally, I’m pretty sure my 2025 will be at least easier to handle than my 2024, and very possibly objectively better. At the end of 2023 I wrote a post, Refilling the Aquifer, explaining how terrible that year had been for me and why I thought 2024 would be hard. And, in fact, yes, 2024 was a very hard year. I won’t bore you with the details because honestly I’m tired just thinking about it. But peering into my crystal ball I genuinely believe 2025 will, in many ways—for me and Kelley and our cats, for some of our friends, for some of our family—be better than 2024.

Is my aquifer refilled? No. That’s an ongoing process—one much delayed, in fact, by the further depletions that occurred this last year, including a lot of health crap. But it has begun to fill. I do feel flickers of random energy—the kind of energy that sparks curiosity and the urge to embark on new projects (see below). Compare that to this time last year when all I wanted to do was soundproof every room, unplug the internet. raise the drawbridge, bring down the portcullis, and refuse all invitations, just to survive.

There were a handful of unexpected and amazing moments—two friends gave me a gift that turned so many things around; the Queer Medieval Town Hall was thrilling, far more thrilling than it had any right to be, on paper; being inducted into the SFF Hall of Fame was both a shock and a delight; and then there’s that publishing thing that happened, the thing I’ve been waiting for for over 25 years, the thing I still can’t talk about (ad m ight not mean much to anyone else when I do), but will, soon—but mostly 2024 was the hard slog I’d predicted.

As I say, though, 2025 is looking up. For one, the political shoe has now dropped and so no longer must be dreaded. For another, I have three projects already underway. The first—only tangentially writing-related—you’ll hear about very soon. Then there are the Aud books being reissued in summer, along with some original Aud fiction. Then there’s a book I just signed a contract for that might be out at the end of 2025 but more likely to be early 2026. And on top of that there’s another, unexpected project that I’m pretty excited about but that has no publisher attached as yet—because I want to get it done (want to see if it can be done) before I sell it. And, yes, I’m in the planning stages of both more Hild and more Peretur.

So, my year ahead? Unclear but definitely promising. May yours be fabulous! See you on the other side.