I’m writing this coming off a week-long bout of food poisoning (thanks to some bad tater tots—seriously), but this should be a coherent enough post. The idea is to look back at my year in writing to see what I’ve accomplished (on the page and beyond), and to talk a little bit about the direction I’ll be taking things in 2025.

So I’m going to brag I guess, and announce some goals out into the world.

Hey Look, I Write Stuff!

Earlier this year I joined the Horror Writers Association, and in June, I was fortunate enough to attend StokerCon in San Diego—this is the writing industry conference that they put on, like AWP but for demented sickos like me who are involved in writing, agenting and publishing scary, fucked-up books, movies and video games. I met so many kind, experienced, talented people who shared a lot of great advice about making a career out of horror writing. I came out with a lot of notes and a lot of ideas, as well as a much-needed reaffirmation that while I’m doing the thing I’m meant to do, I need to be doing a lot more of it, and in better ways.

One of those ways is by just being more visible as a writer, and thus, the long-needed writer’s website. If you’re reading this and haven’t checked out the rest of the site, give it a look! I have all of my published fiction works (all short stories, so far) collected and linked in one place, along with selected nonfiction and some other fun bits and shits created by this guy right here.

The big feature, however, is this blog—in all its sleek, seamless, not-thrown-together-by-someone-who-can-barely-operate-Facebook   glory. The impetus has been to increase my visibility as a writer online, sure, but it’s also just been fun to throw some words out around some of my favorite subjects: horror (in books and film); reading, writing and books in general; film in general; and especially music, especially especially emo and metalcore. I’ve been tossing out a lot of album reviews on the latter, but I had a lot of fun with my debut post “I Just Wanna be Here for the Nostalgia,” linking the growing severity of the current sociopolitical hellscape with the resurgence in emo, so I’m going to find some similar music-related topics to write about as well.

Going into next year, I’m shooting for one blog post a month. I still think it’ll mostly revolve around music and some horror, but there’s at least one big political post coming… hopefully in January, because with inauguration (feel that collective shudder at the thought?), it’d be nice to throw something positive and forward-thinking into the world. Because it will be a hopeful post… something that certainly isn’t easy to write about and hold on to, but is vital to foster and sustain.

But most of the blog posts are gonna be about music and horror.

The Writing

Like with last year, 2024 was for generative writing—nearly all of my fiction consisted of rough drafts. Back in January I revised a couple of short stories and sent them out into the world, but I’ve been more concerned with setting down a lot of rough work that I can come back to over the next few years and prepare to send out.

In early 2024 I went back to a pair of short stories I hadn’t worked on since 2011 and 2013, respectively, and rewrote the everloving hell out of them. (While flinching the entire time at the overdramatic writing style of 19- and 21-year old me… seriously, if you want to feel better about the quality of your writing, go back and read what you wrote from ten years ago. It does wonders for your writerly self-esteem.)

The stories are set in the same world, apocalyptic horror tales that serve as criticisms of organized religion in its artifice and as a tool of the oppressor. The plan was then to write a novella set in this same world, in order to flesh out this apocalypse and the people fighting monsters and psychotic Christian zealots… but by the time I was done it had become 78,000-word novel.

This isn’t a new phenomenon for me, but goddamn if it isn’t aggravating sometimes. Most of my novels come from this, actually, They start off as short stories and grow into novelettes… then novellas… then what should’ve been a story about one moment in a character’s life is now an apocalypse story about religious trauma and suicide and the apocalypse and…

Call it having a lot of storytelling in me, or just not knowing how to write a contained narrative, or just having a habit of running on at the pen but… now I have the rough draft of either a collection consisting of two short stories and a novel, or a novel with three distinct parts to it. Cool. Tabling that one for some time in the future.

Yet over the summer the phenomenon repeated itself. Starting with five really old horror shorts (as in, I first wrote them in high school), I burned those ancient rough drafts and rewrote them into a collection of shorts centered around madness. What better than to tie it together with a novella? Just a novella. Hundred pages at the most.

So now I have this 74,000-word novel. I guess it’ll be tacked onto the end of five short stories (that themselves total 29,000 words).

Well, the goal of 2024 was to generate a lot of new material to come back to later. And I definitely succeeded in doing that.

Fall of this year had me going back a big project that I started in 2023: initially, a four-book horror series about an invasive ecosystem hitting the Pacific Northwest and bringing with it some hungry, hunting monstrosities… So, the goal has been to write the rough draft of one book in the series a year. When I’ll revisit the drafts is a different concern, I just like the idea of having so much of it already set down when the time comes to revise.

So: the rough draft of book two is what I focused on. What should’ve been 80-90k words, tops, came out to a staggering 129,000.

That’s a lot.

The story’s fucking intense, though. High-octane horror-action that depicts rapid and severe ecological disaster, in such a way as to be a commentary on the severe destruction of climate change, as well as reflecting the dramatic changes to society that we’ve seen in our (Millennial) lifetimes, and even commenting on the rise of MAGA ultraconservatism.

Or: it’s action-packed and scary, but also contemplative, relevant and politically radical. I like to give my books some range, y’know?

This meant I had to cut the book short from its original planned ending. So, what would’ve been the third act of book two, I’m now going to expand into a brand new book three—to be worked on at some point in 2025. I already see so many cool and intriguing opportunities for it that I couldn’t have done originally, so I’m nothing but excited. This makes it a planned five-book series, now, which just feels so much more right.

2025

So what’s the game plan for next year? Expect more blog posts. And more short story publications. I had one at the beginning of the year, an emotionally-fraught time-traveling apocalypse break-up story, but it’s been otherwise pretty dry in that area recently. I already have one slated to come out with Black Sheep in April, a multiverse-hopping weird-fiction horror tale that I originally wrote in 2016 and finally found a home for. But I’ve got some new shorts written, which I’m currently revising and will be sending out over the year; I’m feeling pretty confident about their chances of finding homes, a whole lot of horror about the apocalypse, madness, cursed songs, haunted hitmen, and other assorted insanities.

I also have plenty of new short story ideas to get written this year, because the inspirational wellspring hasn’t gone out yet and I plan to drink from that fucker as long as it’s running.

I am going to try my hand at some creative essay writing at some point—not blog posts, but more structured works that I’ll send out to magazines and journals whenever they’re ready. There are a couple of music essays I have in mind, as well as a few about video games—I really, really want to write about Night in the Woods and What Remains of Edith Finch, and I have what I think is fancily called a ludonarrative theory about character perspective in gaming… who knows what it’ll ultimately look like, but it will, at some point, exist. Which is always a start.

I’ve also been thinking about trying to write a film script for the first time in over ten years. A short film script. For a short film. Very short. Like ten pages max. About scary shit. It will be short. Goddammit.

And as mentioned earlier, I’ll be writing the rough draft for book three in the monster-horror series, because I’m nothing if not an ambitious fucker.

But the big focus of my writing in 2025 is going to be returning to the first book in that series. I’ve decided that this is the next one that I’ll be sending out to literary agents, due in part to the stellar feedback I’ve received on the rejections to the cosmic horror novel I’ve been querying out (over the past three years?), and to how much I learned from agents and writers at StokerCon. I have a better handle on what agents are looking for, and how to market a book, and after looking at all the new material I’ve written over the past two-ish years, the monster series seems to be the best fit with the most appeal.

So, although I doubt I’ll have book one rewritten, revised, edited and polished so bright it glows (darkly, of course) by the end of 2025, I will have it at that point by StokerCon 2026, ready to pitch and talk on and on about. This one has a lot of strengths going for it, and if it isn’t picked up then that’s fine… because it’s not like I don’t have plenty of other books to throw out into the lit-sphere.

I got a lot done in 2024, writing-wise. I’ve set some pretty high goals for 2025, and even with the day-to-day trials and horrors (what I refer to as “The Bullshit”) and my attempts at balancing writing with holding onto some kind of social life, I still firmly believe I can get all of this done. Like a lot of people right now, I’m having a hard time looking forward to much of anything… but I can look forward, with well-founded excitement, to another year of writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and…