What a fucking year, right?

I don’t like getting too personal on this blog, but honestly, focusing on my career has been what’s kept me hopeful—which is kinda heavy, but it’s actually a good thing. Over the past year I’ve made it my focus, so it’s been the driving force that’s gotten me to a point in my personal life where things are better than they’ve been in a long time. Still not great, but I’ve made it through some hell and come out the other side to create, nurture, and defend a life that’s focused around writing and being a writer. Things are still kinda fucked, but I have more control over my life now than I’ve had in years, and I’ve turned that freedom toward the life and future that I want.

At the very least, it’s helped me deal with the ongoing hell that we’re all stuck in right now.

I’ve put a lot of work into my career in 2025, and the results will show soon. My goals from the end of last year changed, but that’s been due to a pretty big shift in how I view myself as a writer.

I’m talking around some things that I’m not quite ready to announce, but there’s some news coming soon. Ish.

So, here’s how things went this year: unexpected, but incredibly promising.

Publications

I got a few things published this year, all horror (of course). There’s:

“The Thirty-Fourth World” (multiverse-horror)

“The Living Shadows” (crime-horror)

“Bumps” (experimental gothic)

I’ve got seven other shorts that I’m constantly sending out (two apocalyptic horror, one cursed-media horror, one psychological horror, two sci-fi and one literary), which isn’t the rate of acceptance I’d like, but hey: three published pieces in a year is still pretty damn good. And I still like the chances for everything else going into next year.

The New Stuff

Over the past few years I’ve focused mostly on new writing—rough drafts of short stories, novellas and novels that are mostly horror, a little bit sci-fi, and an even littlier bit literary, with the goal of having a backlog of work to return to, revise, and send out into the world over these next few years. There’s plenty of new stuff I’ll be writing still, but in the near future I’ll be focusing mostly on revisions and publications.

New work this year was varied in some unexpected ways. I completed a somewhat-linked horror collection centered around nightmares set in my old Edgewater stomping grounds.

This one consists of three flash pieces, two shorts and a novella that altogether come out to nearly 40,000 words (about 140 pages).

I also returned to a much older Southern gothic crime-horror story, continuing an effort to return to my decades-long backlog of older work and rewrite it as something better. In this case, something way, way better.

I also wrote my first film scripts in (I think?) fifteen years. They’re both horror (of course), pack a punch, and were reminiscent of back when me and some friends used to make really, really shitty amateur shorts in high school, so it was fun for that alone. I also learned that my tendency to turn a short story into a full-blown novel applies to screenwriting, too, because the second script turned into a feature-length one. It’s a horror technothriller about remote surveillance technology falling into the wrong hands and being used for one of the worst things it could be used for… which creates a domino effect of consequences for everyone involved.

What am I going to do with these scripts? Not sure yet. I’d love to get at least the one short script into the hands of some indie filmmakers. So if you know someone who’s in that world who’d be interested in a fucked-up ASMR-horror short film, send them my way.

But that wasn’t all the new material I wrote this year. There were also the novels. A pair of them. They kinda derailed the second half of my writing year… but in the best way.

This Was Supposed to Be a Short Story

So I have this habit of underestimating just how large a given project will be. Or, that I think this idea will be a short story and then a few pages in I realize it’s probably a novella… and then by fifty or sixty pages I see (with a mixture of horror and excitement) that it’s actually a novel. Well, cool, that’s awesome… somewhat. It’s cool if I don’t have any other projects to work on, but it’s not cool if the space for this in my writing schedule was for a short story (which takes a week or two to write) and not a whole-ass novel (two to four months). Not a bad problem to have, sure, but that meant the revisions on a different novel that were supposed to be done by now have been pushed back to next year.

This is because what was supposed to be a short story in April became a novel. Then I realized it would be too long for the kind of story it is, so it became a duology. I decided to finish the rough draft of book one by early summer, then go work on some other stuff, and then come back at the end of the summer to write the second book.

When I got to this second book, though, two things happened. One, what I thought would be 300 pages (like the first book) became 550. And book two of the duology turned out to be book two of a trilogy.

Commence banging my head against the wall, trying to figure out why I’m like this.

But I’m not returning to this project for a few years. I’ve made extensive notes and a good-enough outline for book three, and it’s cool to know that I’ll have this trilogy in my back pocket for publishers at some point. And it turns out that it’s tied into a much, much larger project that I’ve been researching (more on that later), so I’ve actually been working on that one this whole time.

I’ve even got the elevator pitch for this trilogy down already: It’s BioShock set in the multiverse with giant flesh-eating mutant cockroaches and teen angst.

It’s also about generational trauma, child abuse, found family and self-empowerment… with giant flesh-eating mutant cockroaches. So, pretty lighthearted stuff. Like usual.

The Other Series

So I have this other horror series, five planned books, with the first two already written. The idea was to write a book in this series a year, but I pretty quickly abandoned that when I went back to revise book one… mostly because I realize now that that’s kinda crazy to attempt. But knowing what’s going to happen all the way through to the end of the series has made book one stronger. It’ll give the series cohesion from book to book, at least. But I decided to act like a sane person (for once) and shrink my focus onto just book one for now, with the goal of querying it out to literary agents sometime in the first half of 2026.

This is the one I mentioned last year, revolving around a severe ecological disaster in the Pacific Northwest that brings with it an organic threat—not just a few invasive species, but an entire invasive ecosystem. And that ecosystem is hungry. Think the Southern Reach series but with a heavier focus on action, and thematic concerns around climate change, ultraconservatism, and how the psychology of violence and trauma spreads among people like a contagion. So, it’s about as lighthearted as the aforementioned trilogy. I’ll begin querying that out next year, and I think it has a pretty good chance of getting picked up… eventually.

This will also be the beginning of a new yearly goal: to revise a novel up to the point of querying it to agents, and then to start querying it. Thanks to the sheer quantity of material I’ve written over the past few years, I’ve got plenty to work with. This was by design, kind of a phase one, with phase two being a lot of revising and querying. The idea is that, while getting an agent to represent your work is extremely difficult, your chances go up with each separate novel you’re sending out. Especially if you’re adding a new one to your querying repertoire each year.

Plus, I’m way more confident in what I’ll be querying now, than in the novel that I’d been sending out before. So that helps.

The Epic Project

I’ll be talking around this one, because it’s not ready for a full-out reveal—but for years and years and years now, I’ve been working on an epic series. “Working” meant, for the longest time, doing sporadic research, plotting a little, mostly just thinking about it. But three years ago, I began working on it in earnest, writing down lore and worldbuilding that had been swirling around in my head for well over a decade. This has evolved into a comprehensive, intricate, mindbending planned series with a multi-book plot that I’m nowhere near ready to start actually writing yet, at least not for a few more years.

Instead, I’ll keep researching across a huge range of topics, and once that research is done, I’ll begin plotting and even making character sketches (something I’ve never done before). Currently, I’m in this massive research and worldbuilding stage, which I’ve broken down into sections, roughly correlating by year. The last two years have been focused on learning about quantum mechanics, which is a really good way to screw up your perception of the universe and reality. I highly recommend it.

This year’s research included reading up on midcentury Chicago history, the Cuban Missile Crisis, certain advanced technologies (real or imagined), and how revolutions work (for this last, one of the books I read was Fareed Zakaria’s Age of Revolutions, which I recommend for anyone interested on the history and principles of how revolutions work).

And then worldbuilding followed. The latter part of this year, I’ve been creating a pretty unique setting for part of this series that involves a fictional version of my favorite city, my home, Chicago. But cyberpunk. In an alternate timeline. (Which I was doing before it was announced that the next Cyberpunk game will be set here, dammit!)

Anyway, next year’s research will involve reading up on democratic socialism and probably some (more) quantum mechanics, green tech, and so on. I also need to read some novels set in alternate timelines. The worldbuilding for this component is going to be… intense. But fun. And mindbending, exciting, a beautiful mess… which is my favorite way to work. When I’m finally ready to start actually writing this series, it’s going to be big, the culmination of more than a decade’s worth of prep.

2026

Next year’s goals are pretty intense, but I’m enthusiastic about taking all of this on.

First off, book one in the ecological-disaster horror series gets revised up to my highest standard, then queried out to agents.

The short stories I wrote in 2025 get revised up to publishable quality, and sent out to magazines.

Then I’ll write a bunch of new short stories, too—I’ve already got plenty of ideas. Almost all horror, of course.

Other new stuff will involve a pair of horror novellas (that will be scary and heartwrenching), as well as maybe another short film script or two? And one of these years I’ll actually write out some essays, on topics including music festivals to videogames. Eventually.

As mentioned earlier, research on the epic project is going to shift into reading up on democratic socialism, alternate timelines and history, and more quantum mechanics… all to inform some pretty crazy worldbuilding.

Some more blog posts, too, hopefully one a month, and as free-form in content and style as it’s ever been. This has been a fun way to get more of my writing out into the world while having (some) engagement, so expect more posts about alternative music, horror, reading and writing, geeky shit, and anything and everything else.

Also, you might’ve noticed the website got an overhaul. It looks kinda better, right? Like maybe I know what I’m doing? Like if you squint at it in the right light, it looks almost semi-professional? Or at least easier to navigate and read on.

And finally, there’s some big career announcements on the way, with the first one hopefully coming by the spring. I don’t like announcing stuff until it’s confirmed and ready, but I’m shifting my career into a far more active state. It feels like I’ve been dormant, and not as far along as I should be… but my work over the past few years has been in preparation for what’s coming in the next few, so if you’ve been following me for this long, get ready to hear more from me.