Happy (Gregorian) New Year to all—I hope that no matter what kind of 2024 you had, that 2025 is a better one. I’m hoping for that simple thing this year, as well, especially after hitting some burn out near the end of 2024 and having to force myself to slow down—the majority of my plans for December had to be scrapped, in the end, to focus on rest and recovery.

2024 was filled with some ups and downs, but overall was a positive one for my writing! Despite scaling back my short story writing and submissions significantly, I saw a lot of progress in those publications—and, of course, my debut novel Pray For Him was released in October! I worked on some cool projects and have a few things to look forward to in 2025.

Short story publications

I published 11 shorts in 2024, plus re-published one of the shorts from Devout: An Anthology of Angels as a standalone on Amazon/KU. The stories ranged from 100 words to 8,000 (stretching the definition of short story a bit), and include some very personal ones, some I’m very proud of, and some where I let myself experiment a bit with my own boundaries. I’ll highlight just a few:

• “Love Like the Moon” in the anthology Carpe Noctem is a sapphic horror romance, and working with the editors was a wonderful experience where they really pushed me to make certain elements worse (in the best way possible). The anthology itself is incredibly cool, and I highly recommend checking it out for the interactive element created by the editors.

• “From This Day Forward” in Even Cozier Cosmic is a cosmic grief horror story that deals with some personal subjects. I was in the previous anthology as well, so it was cool to get an opportunity to submit again with another story about grief. This was a fun one because I had first come up with the base idea a few years ago, and re-wrote it in 2023 after coming back to writing. So it was a wonderful moment to find a home for this story that I originally conceived of so many years ago!

• “Nana's Teeth”, in the charity anthology, There's a Haint in That There Holler, is a story close to my heart as it was inspired by the act of spread my grandmother’s ashes in the mountains last summer and the ritual of going through her things. A few months later, I woke up with the opening in my head, wrote half the story, went to work, then wrote the second half of the story as soon as I was off work that evening. When I saw the call for donated stories for the charity anthology a few months after that, it felt like the perfect home for a story about coming together with family during hardships.

• “Make Me a Freak Show” was published in The Icarus Writing Collective's Monstrous issue and I am mostly flagging because I love this story, including the opportunity to parallel the ‘freak show’ with queer and disabled bodies. This one was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the Icarus Writing Collective, and I am so honoured.

• “Closer to Death” came out in The Circus Collective's Taboo issue, and was a story I was nervous and excited about putting out into the world as my most erotic piece to date, but I had fun with it!

• And lastly, “A Handful of Bullets” in Dead Cowpokes Don't Wrangle — this was an incredibly fun project to be invited to participate in, with a roster absolutely packed with talented authors I am grateful to call friends. This story was a massive rework of a story I originally wrote seven years prior (in 2017). It was an interesting experience to take a story that was nothing like what I write now, apply the ways I’ve evolved as a writer, and nearly triple the length, to create a story that is completely different but also holds the elements that still spoke to me. I’m proud of the story it became, and glad to have been part of this incredible anthology. Plus: my first audio release!

That was longer than expected, but there were quite a few I was especially proud of or wanted to highlight, so ultimately a good thing! As always, you can find all of my short fiction publications, including which are free to read and content warnings, on my author site.

Pray For Him

I already did a one-month retrospective in November on my first month as a debut novelist, so I don’t think there’s too much most to say here other than an update on sales and figures—including the results of the Dark Mode Stuff Your Kindle event.

Because, including those free downloads during Dark Mode, Pray For Him has now moved over 5,750 copies. Which is incredible! Dark Mode was a massive boost to my orders and, while the nature of a free download event is that the royalties don’t increase proportionately to the number of orders, that means a ton more people with access to Pray For Him and getting to read that story which is one of my primary goals as an author. I also moved some copies of “What About the Dog?”, “One Saturday Morning” and “And The Mountains Melt Like Wax” during the event, which was awesome!

As for Kindle Unlimited reads, Pray For Him ended 2024 with almost 20,000 reads—it’s been going steady, which I’m very happy about!

Did I make my 2024 goals?

In my 2023 wrap up post, I had set out a few goals for 2024. How did I do on those?

• Announce and publish Pray For Him? ✅ (check!)

• Continue to publish short stories? ✅ (check!)

• Draft the next long form project? ❌ (X—error noise goes here)

I am very happy the first two were successes, but I got majorly sidetracked off the last one between Pray For Him taking longer to finalize than expected and hitting some burn out in the last few months of 2024. I started and worked on a few different projects, but no drafts are terribly near completion at this time. Still, not bad!

What’s in store for 2025

And with that, we close out 2024 for real—and set out what we’re hoping to accomplish in 2025! I’ve got a few things in store already, and a few things I want to work on.

• More short story publications—I’m planning on starting to re-publish some of my backlist of short stories as standalone, as well as publishing some stories for the first time, in preparation for an eventual story collection. More on that… eventually. No set date for any of these, though don’t expect the collection itself any earlier than late 2025 due to exclusivity clauses in some existing contracts. But the republished shorts will start to appear in the next few months!

• Goodies! I’m planning on creating some merch (some things have already begun)—think stickers, bookmarks, bookplates, things like that. While signed copies likely aren’t in the works (due to the fact that the majority of my readers are not in the same country as me), I’m hoping to create smaller goodies that are more easily shippable.

• A special edition of Pray For Him was just announced from The Laughing Man House, coming September 2025! More on that from the press itself, but I’m very excited for this.

• Lastly, as mentioned above I have a few longer works that have begun. It’s too early to say when any will be completed, let alone published, I have a few novellas and novels I’m very excited to finish drafting and get out into the world. My ‘drafts’ folder is quite large, but a few standout as the likely next few projects, so look out soon for more news about future projects. I’m hoping to get at least one finished drafting before the end of the year so that I can set out a release date shortly thereafter.

• In general, I want to push my own limits a bit and experiment more. I want to be bold in my writing and see where it leads me.

All this to say: expect short stories to fill the majority of the 2025 publishing schedule, but rest assured I have some bigger projects in the works as well as goodies coming sometime soon.

Thanks as always for coming along for the ride, and I can’t wait to see what comes next for all of us. Not sure when the next newsletter will be—for the time being, I’m planning on keeping the newsletter to when I have big updates, reflections, or thoughts to share. I’ve thought about using it as a place for essays as well (as a big fan of Morgan Dante’s substack, highly recommend as their posts are always informative and insightful), but I’m still exploring the best venue.

Until next time—take care.