Happy New Year! And welcome back to my monthly newsletter. The big focus this time: reviewing last year’s goals, seeing what I hit and what I missed, and then making goals for this year.

And, of course, other fun things. If you missed my final post in December (no, not the blog highlights post), then you missed something fun, so keep reading to find a link to that.

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Writing and Publishing

You can access the blog post where I set last year’s goals here.

The Year in Review

Here’s last year’s goals:

• Productivity: 30 minutes/500 words of writing a day. (Weekends optional.)
• Publishing:
  • Inner Demon self-published by or before March, including the audiobook.
  • Halfwhisker self-published by or before the end of the year, preferably through Kickstarter.
  • Courage in a Small Heart converted to graphic novel format and self-published directly on my website.

And how did I stack up against those goals?

First off, the productivity goals were fairly easy to hit. I won’t say I hit exactly thirty minutes every workday, but I had days where I went well over that number and days where I fell short. I think it all averaged out at or above thirty minutes (or five hundred words) a day.

Moving on—wow, my publishing goals were aggressive. Two books in one year, and one of those books epic fantasy? I clearly didn’t learn from The Failed Technomancer just how many roadblocks can pop up out of nowhere, and I didn’t predict well just how much of a bear Halfwhisker was going to develop into. To say nothing of attempting to self-publish my first-ever graphic novel. Goals that make you stretch are good—but goals that are still attainable in the first place are best, and these goals weren’t attainable without me making unacceptable sacrifices (like neglecting my family) or unreasonably risky sacrifices (like quitting my job).

That said, not all is painful reality or missed expectations. Inner Demon was still published last year, on July 2nd, so I at least hit the goal of publishing that book at all. It was a similar story for the audiobook, which was published even later, but at least it got published. I call those big wins.

That’s where the tangible publishing wins end, though.

I didn’t get anywhere near publishing Halfwhisker last year. If I had wanted to rush out a first-draft publication, then this goal would have been achievable, but I decided to prioritize quality over rapidity—so Halfwhisker stayed in the oven.

Work on Courage in a Small Heart, adaptation to graphic novel form, sputtered out and died in the second half of the year. I found an artist who was interested, but she ended up being too busy to follow through on what we had discussed and I didn’t it a priority to seek someone else. Oh well. Maybe this year will be the year.

(You can read the short story version of Courage in a Small Heart here, by the way. If you are so inclined.)

So, in short—I set goals that I knew would stretch my limited time and resources and I didn’t get very close to what I had hoped for. In some areas that was because I wasn’t able to stretch as far as I had hoped; in other areas I decided that it wasn’t worth hitting my goal of just publishing if I wasn’t proud of what I was publishing.

But at least I didn’t miss every goal! Publishing a book at all, in multiple formats, is still a big win.

Goals for 2026

I still want to split up my goals into general categories, and I want to keep Productivity and Publishing as two of those categories. But I need a new third category, which I’m tentatively going to name Business. After all, getting a book published is just half the battle: realizing that being an author makes you a small business and figuring out how to get your book into people’s hands is the second half of the battle.

Productivity: I’m going to keep my goal from last year, but it needs clarification. On work days I want to spend a minimum of thirty minutes writing on my primary project (or write a minimum of five hundred words for said project), and I want to average three blog posts a month (not counting newsletters).

I need to split up those two areas of my writing, and I need to prioritize novels over blog posts, otherwise the easier writing—blog posts—risks taking over when I’m tired or demotivated.

Publishing: Keep it simple, stupid. I’ve got one big focus, one massive goal, this year, and that’s publishing Halfwhisker.

I’m going all-out on Halfwhisker. I’ve learned a lot from The Failed Technomancer and Inner Demon, ranging from doing more of the process myself (such as formatting the ebook or PDF) to confirming which parts of the process I really shouldn’t do all, or primarily, by myself (such as certain types of editing, or creating the audiobook). It’s time to apply those lessons… And learn new ones.

I want to publish Halfwhisker seven times next year. Hold on, I’m not publishing the same book with multiple endings or anything like that—this isn’t Clue. The book is looking like it’s going to be around 200,000 words, but the book is also neatly split into about five parts that are very novella-sized. So, to accommodate for everyone who doesn’t like doorstoppers, I want to publish each Part of Halfwhisker individually, in ebook form (that’s the first five times I’ll “publish” Halfwhisker), and then I’ll publish the whole book in one as a single ebook, which will also be the only version available in physical form. I’ll probably publish once a month as part of a big build-up.

Oh, the complete version will also include an appendix and other interesting things, to add some value to people who buy the “novellas” as they come out and then want to buy the complete package. And… I want to try formatting this version of the book myself, using Affinity Publisher. (I’ll probably use something simple like Vellum for the ebooks.)

But that’s not all. If I can swing it, I really want to run a Kickstarter to ensure I can afford lots of art in this book—I think Halfwhisker deserves it, and I think readers will love regular depictions of the beautiful, weird world I’ve created. That’s not my highest priority, but it’s up there.

Finally, the audiobook—I’m not a professional voice actor. I think I did a fine enough job on the audiobooks for The Failed Technomancer and Inner Demon, but I’ve reached the point where I just don’t think what I can do mostly on my own is good enough. Certainly not for Halfwhisker, my most ambitious project yet. So I’m at a bit of a crossroads. I’ll poke around and see if I can find a voice actor that can do the book justice, but what I really want to do is a full-cast production, kind of like what Devon Eriksen did with Theft of Fire‘s audiobook. I wouldn’t pull a fraction of his numbers on Kickstarter, though, and I don’t have deep enough pockets to fully fund the project myself, so I’m looking into AI narration as one possible option. I’m not stoked about that idea, as I haven’t heard any AI narrators that… sound right. Even the ones touted as “indistinguishable from human voice actors” sound off to me, whether or not I know the narration is AI beforehand. But a company called Spoken Press appears promising, so maybe I’ll be persuaded by the time I hit that point. We’ll see.

Completing the audiobook isn’t as high priority for me in 2026 as just publishing Halfwhisker, and if I have to choose between one or the other I’d choose the Kickstarter over the full-cast audiobook. But is it greedy for me to want to have it all? I want it all.

Anyway—on top of all that, I have two smaller publishing-related goals that do not take priority over the above in any way, shape, or form, but I plan on working on in whatever spare time I have. So these aren’t projects I’m promising will be available any time soon, or even meaningfully developed in 2026, but they still are on my radar.

First: Courage in a Small Heart graphic novel. The script is written. I just need an artist. How hard could that be?

Second: Shadowdorks. I’ve been toying with script and story ideas for an episodic, darkly comedic web comic inspired by the weekly Shadowdark games I play with my family. (So, kind of like how Dragonlance came to be.) If this happens, my brother (who is one of the players) will be the artist—his drawings are often far funnier than any verbal joke I could hope to come up with, so really he’s going to be the star of the show, I think.

Business: This is the goal that won’t have as definable a metric—this year.

I didn’t want to make the business side of being an indie author one of my primary focuses until I had about three books published—in other words, until I had at least somewhat of a backlog. Well, before the end of 2026, assuming I hit my above goals, I should be in that exact position, which means it’s time for me to learn things like marketing, ad spots, and so forth.

If I actually make any money, I should probably figure out taxes, too.

I’m so in the dark on most of these topics—I don’t know what I don’t know, so maybe my business goal should be to figure out what I don’t know, so I can then experiment on turning my “don’t knows” into strengths. That sounds reasonable. And I’ll also experiment with ads.

I think I can do that.

December in Review

Shrinking the scope down a bit—what did I do in December, as far as writing and publishing is concerned?

I worked on Halfwhisker Part 4.

And I took it slower than I usually do, as far as writing is concerned, for the Christmas season is even more a season for family and worship than any other season.

Goals for January

Finish Halfwhisker Part 4, get it out to my test readers, and start Halfwhisker Part 5.

The end for revisions on this manuscript are going to be visible down the road before too long, after just one or two more bends—I can feel it!

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The Blog

December was also a slow month for the blog—but I’ve still got a few fun things to share for anyone who missed any of last month’s posts. I’ll even start with the biggest one.

• Halfwhisker Prologue: Merry Christmas! My gift to you last year was a preview of the prologue for Halfwhisker. I hope you enjoy!
• Silksong: One of the most highly anticipated, and most disruptive, indie games of 2025, I finally managed to finish my thoughts on Silksong before the end of the year. And let me tell you… I had a good time.
• Comanches: A history novel about the Comanche Amerindian people. It’s an eye-opening read, to say the least.
• 2025 Blog in Review: My favorite novels that I reviewed that year, the articles that appeared to garner the most interest, and more. This post is essentially a highlights and hits for the year, but I think I managed to make it fun. Who doesn’t like a good clip show?

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My Reading List

After Moses: Evensong. This book out-prioritizes everything else until I finish it. That said, since I’m writing this newsletter in advance, I don’t actually know how close I will be to finishing it once January rolls around—since I’ll have most of December to read it, I’d be surprised if I’m not almost finished with it, if not finished, by the time this newsletter goes live. Which means, all things going well, you’ll get a review next week.

So, what’s next?

I really liked Deathbringer, so I’m putting Lifebinder next in line on my reading list. I’m curious whether or not Inga will manage to restore herself to life, or whether she’s doomed to be undead(?) until the day she… re-dies.

Can Inga age, if she’s technically dead, only Deathbringer’s magic animating her? Is she functionally immortal? Maybe these questions will be answered in this book.

Last month I expressed interest in reading Shadow of the Conqueror, Shad M Brooks, and an Alyssa Hazel book (I was leaning toward Among the Juniper Trees, I think). Unfortunately, it appears those books might be permanently off the table as options. I want to actually own the books I purchase—including ebooks—and Amazon doesn’t allow for that. As such, any books that appear to be only available through Amazon I can’t read, not unless I find them so promising as to spring for the higher prices of physical copies—and I usually only buy the physical copies of ebooks that particularly impressed me.

I tried to reach out to the authors in question to see if I could buy the books directly from them, but no dice, at least at the time of writing. So… We’ll see. I’m still interested, if nothing else.

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Finally—What Else do I Recommend This Month?

Space King, episode 4, released in December. Do I really need to say more?

ALL HAIL SPACE KING.