So long, 2025. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

So, how did everyone’s 2025 turn out? Apart from the last two months, mine was okay. I’m looking at my whiteboard next to my desk, and I can see lots of projects finished and published. I’m a bit disappointed not to have got World War 3.3 out in November as I intended, but I’m pretty close to wrapping that up now and will probably release it while I’m down in Sydney in early to mid-January.

So, work-wise, it was a pretty good year for me. I had all the usual misadventures. I think a melanoma came off at one point. I’ve had so many of them cut out of me now that I’m a bit meh about it. I shouldn’t be, because one of these things will kill me eventually, but my dermo promises that as long as I keep coming in, he’s more than happy to keep cutting them out. So, there’s that, I guess.

I got a bit more reading done this year. I really got into Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. That was my lunchtime read. The chapters are nice and short, so 10 or 15 minutes after lunch would usually give me two or three chapters, which was enough to keep up a sense of narrative momentum. I think I probably read more this year than I managed in the previous decade and that’s something I’d like to keep going in the next 12 months.

I feel pretty relaxed about how 2026 will go for me professionally. I’ll keep rolling out new volumes in the Axis of Time series once every two or three months, basically until the whole thing is done. I’ve got a couple of other things planned for after that that I’m really looking forward to writing.

I’m really not happy that The Forever Dead hasn’t been published, given that I finished the first draft of that book nearly two years ago, but maybe I’ll take the opportunity to put out another novella in the series. Or maybe, in my small, petty-minded way, just publishing one Axis of Time novel after another will satisfy me, as I demo just how many books you can release in 12 months if you turn your mind to it.

I can’t say I feel good about much else, though. I can’t believe I’m now one of those old men who sit on their porches cradling a shotgun, waiting for the world to fall to pieces, but that’s where I am, psychologically at least.

I did have a couple of paragraphs here about the fall of the US and the invasion of Taiwan and the end of Western civilisation, but nobody needs to read that nonsense. So I think I’ll just keep writing my books, and my little blog posts, and I’ll otherwise keep my head down.

Good luck to you all.