2025 has been another pretty slow year for me in terms of getting stuff published. My short story collection Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories was finally released in July, a year later than hoped, and my second Aleyara story, “Aleyara’s Flight,” was published in the November/December 2025 Analog, although there have been delays in getting out the print version of the issue (I gather that finally cleared up this past week or so, so hopefully subscribers will see it soon). I sold a third story in the series, “Skin in the Game,” though it probably won’t be out for another year. My 2006 novel X-Men: Watchers on the Walls finally came back into print in an e-book edition in February.

On the Patreon front, I finally brought my Original Fiction tier slightly back from oblivion with two exclusive stories: “Birth of Knowledge,” an old unsold story that’s outdated in some respects but resonates with current concerns over AI, and “The Demon in the Depths,” a new story (the third) in my Thayara fantasy universe. My weekly rewatch-reviews covered Blake’s 7 Series A-B and Series C-D, the short-lived 1993 series Space Rangers with Linda Hunt, Marjorie Monaghan, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and the Starhunter ReduX re-edit of the Canadian space bounty-hunter series from 2000 — which got to be kind of a slog to get through (though the second season, which I’m currently reviewing, is a marked improvement), so I added a parallel review series of the RoboCop film and TV franchise (with a few comics covered as a bonus), running on Fridays alternating with Starhunter on Tuesdays. Both series are completely written and uploaded and will continue through late May 2026 (coincidentally both ending in the same week).

I know my Patreon doesn’t have as much to offer as I would’ve hoped, but it’s my only regular source of income at the moment, so I’d really appreciate it if more of my readers would subscribe, even at the $1/mo Tip Jar level. As a new feature, it’s now possible for non-subscribers to buy individual stories, story collections, or review series, so you can contribute with a one-time purchase rather than a monthly subscription.

If my Patreon doesn’t grab you, one way my readers could help me is simply by posting reviews of my books on Amazon. Books that have at least 50 reviews get promoted more on the site, so posting even a brief review or rating is a good, simple way to help out. To date, all my Star Trek books have well above 50 reviews or ratings, but none of my original books have reached that threshold (nor have my Marvel novels, but I get no royalties from their sales, so it’s a moot point). Only Superhuman comes closest, needing only 8 more reviews to hit the threshold, but my other original books (including audiobooks) are desperately in need of reviews. Of course, this doesn’t just apply to me, but to any author you want to support.

My writing progress this year has been slower than I’ve hoped, but I achieved a few goals. I completed turning my unsold Troubleshooter graphic novel script into a prose novel, which would now be the second of the three completed novels in that series (Only Superhuman being the first), and I’ve completed a draft of a fourth Aleyara story. I wrote two Thayara stories for open-call anthologies, yet both unrelated anthologies inexplicably closed to submissions earlier than I’d been led to expect, before I was even able to submit either story, so that was frustrating. (“The Demon in the Depths” was the second one. I’m still trying to sell the first somewhere, but it will end up on Patreon if I can’t.)

I’ve had a list of projects taped up on the inside of my apartment’s front door, although what started as a list of projects for 2023 ended up being headed “PROJECTS 2023 4 5,” because I usually write more slowly than I expect when I don’t have a deadline. But by the start of December, I’d finally crossed off everything on the list except an outline for a fourth Troubleshooter novel (and one tentative possibility with a question mark after it, which didn’t really count). Maybe it’s premature to outline a fourth novel before I’ve sold the second and third, but I really wanted to clear the list at last, so I’ve spent the past few weeks trying to get that outline figured out, and I finally managed to cross off that item yesterday. (Even a self-imposed deadline can help.)

So my board is clear for new projects, which I hope to line up before long. I’ve been grateful to be able to live off my late Uncle Clarence’s generous inheritance and take an extended sabbatical devoted to my original writing, but it’s high time I got back into contract work, and hopefully it won’t be much longer before my name appears on a Star Trek project again. I really hope to find something as soon as possible, not just so I can start earning an honest living again, but because I get depressed when I’m not working on something creative.

Unfortunately, I have one major setback to report. Due to the challenges of the current economy, my publisher at eSpec Books has reluctantly decided that they will not be able to publish Arachne’s Legacy, the third volume of the Arachne saga. (This will not affect the availability of the first two novels, though, and they stand alone as a complete story without the third, since they were originally written as a single long novel. So don’t let this discourage you from buying the first two, since eSpec could use all the support they can get right now.) So as the new year begins, I’m going to have to devote myself to seeking a new publisher, and ideally finally finding an agent to help me line up writing projects. Between Arachne’s Legacy, two Troubleshooter manuscripts, and the four Aleyara stories that I intend to combine into a fix-up novel, I now have four novels’ worth of original science fiction that I need to get published. So I really need to get better at connecting with publishers, or find an agent who can do it for me.

If any of my writer or editor friends and colleagues reading this have any advice about finding agents or publishers, can recommend any who are open to submissions, or are aware of any SF or fantasy anthologies that are recruiting authors, please contact me. I’m completely available at the moment.

In other news, I got a couple of major technology upgrades. The high-end hand-me-down laptop I got from my big sister has worked out very well for me. Since my desktop mini-PC occasionally crashes for no known reason (which it’s rarely done since I took it to the shop earlier this year, despite their inability to find the problem, yet has begun doing again infrequently in recent months), I now do all my fiction and review writing on the laptop, promptly backing it up to the cloud (and to my PC, which I finally figured out how to access through the laptop’s File Explorer). My apartment also finally got a fiber-optic phone/internet upgrade in February, making my browsing and smart-TV viewing much faster and smoother. I was surprised when the internet service went out suddenly last week, the first time it’s done that since the upgrade, but when I called tech support, I got a recorded message saying they were already aware of an outage with the networking service and were working to fix it. Luckily the weather was unseasonably warm that morning, so I went for a long walk and it was fixed by the time I got back. It’s a nice contrast to the old copper-wire system, which had so few qualified technicians left to work on it that it usually took days to fix the frequent outages.

Other household purchases this year have included a new, whisper-quiet fan for my living room, necessary in hot weather as I spend a lot of time there since getting my smart TV and my new laptop, and my apartment’s circulation in that area is poor. It’s battery-powered so I can put it wherever I need it without having to keep it plugged in, so it’s very convenient, if not as powerful as a bladed fan. I also got one of those adhesive nightlight bug traps for the kitchen, which worked very well at trapping gnats at first but less so subsequently, and I’m not sure if that’s because the refill adhesive cards I bought are inferior or if it’s just that gnat season was already ending around then. I also got a new wristwatch because my old one was falling apart. I had some troubles with persistent “ghost flushing” in my toilet (water slowly draining from the tank until the valve opened and it refilled), and the maintenance guy and I tried replacing various components until I finally figured out that it was simply because the tube from the fill valve to the overflow pipe was pushed too low, so its outlet was below the water level and caused a siphoning effect. All I had to do was pull it up slightly and the problem was solved.

All in all, it’s been mostly a pretty quiet, comfortable year, aside from a couple of minor setbacks like my tire blowing out en route to the Shore Leave Convention, though that worked out more easily than it might have. I also had my car battery die last winter, and my jumpstarter battery got overstrained, expanded dangerously, and had to be replaced. I haven’t had to use the new jumpstarter yet, and when there’s been heavy snow, I’ve made sure to go out and clear it off the windshield so my solar battery tender could keep the battery charged.

My health has been pretty good aside from an infection that cleared up with antibiotics, and I’ve managed to take pretty regular walks around the neighborhood, which aren’t just good exercise but are my best time for plotting stories and figuring out scenes. Thanks to some new sidewalk construction, the nearby Fairview Park has become one of my favorite places to walk and think, though it’s a far enough walk that sometimes I’ve driven to the outskirts of the park and then walked the long loop through the park and back to my car. I could still probably use more exercise than I’m getting, though, and it looks like I’ll need a new glasses prescription soon. I was concerned that my ACA health care subsidies might be reduced or go away in 2026, but it looks like I’m one of the lucky ones who’ll still be covered. Which makes my need to find new work a little less urgent, but still important in the long run, since I need to save up for the future.

So I go into 2026 at a fairly comfortable place, but with basically no idea what my future holds, aside from knowing that “Skin in the Game” will appear in Analog probably late in the year. Hopefully some of the feelers I’ve put out already or will put out soon will produce results before long. In the meantime, maybe I can use the time to develop some of the tentative ideas I’ve still got floating around, or come up with something new. Hopefully next year will see some improvements in the state of the country as well. I’m aware that my quiet, relatively trouble-free life is a luxury in these times, but there are some reasons for optimism that things will start to get better, or at least not as much worse as we’ve feared.