2025, am I right?

A year of contradictions: immense gratitude, family love, and family loss; a year of writing more and publishing less, of building and discovering who I am as a person, parent, and writer; and year of silence and rejection. In my privileged life, I am grateful for it all, but I also look forward to seeing where 2026 takes me.

I’ve seen a lot of the phrase “Begin as you mean to go on,” around the holidays/end of the year. It’s used as a rallying cry (though cry sounds harsh; perhaps a rallying whisper or excited murmur) as well as a writing sprint or reading challenge. Its origins, I learned after some research, come from Charles H. Spurgeon, a preacher whose written works appeal to Christians of many denominations. The quote in full comes from Spurgeon’s work All of Grace, written in 1886, and goes:

Begin as you mean to go on, and go on as you began, and let the Lord be all in all to you.

So there is a religious origin, but as with much of Spurgeon’s work, it appeals to more than a single belief system.

In any case, I do, in fact, mean to go on. With writing. With reading. With connections. With family. With love. With life.

I may not begin exactly as I mean to. Parenting a 5yo and 7yo during holiday break is its own marathon, full of love and excitement but also overstimulation. My husband and I feel (as I’m sure all parents and caregivers feel during this time) a bit jet lagged in the physical and mental sense. So I can’t promise a spark of immediate and overwhelming creativity and productivity today, on January 1st. But I mean to go on, with as much grace and motivation as I can muster.

This wouldn’t be my newsletter if I didn’t list some great work. Short stories and books got me through a lot of 2025, as they usually do. I read 60 books across a variety of genres. Here is a small list of my favorite books in no particular order:

• The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

• I, Medusa by Ayana Gray

• Audition for the Fox by Martin Cahill

• The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig

• Hellions by Julia Elliott

• The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

• Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

• A Long Game by Elizabeth McCracken

• Sick Houses by Leila Taylor

• Fen, Bog, & Swamp by Annie Proulx

• Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine by Kristina Ten

Around mid-January I’ll have a Book Riot post go live with some of my favorite late-2025 short fiction stories. That post will cover a lot of my love for short fiction in 2025, though it’s by no means an exhaustive list.

As I mean to…

I have a lot of hope for 2026, which may be naive in this day and age, but I can’t help it. I hope my kids continue to grow into their beautiful and unique personalities and intelligence. I hope to stay more connected with friends and family. I hope an editor picks up one of my books on sub (or both. Both is good, too). I hope to write more. I hope to publish more. I hope to spotlight more beautiful and brilliant works for Book Riot (and hopefully more for Reactor as well!). Here they are, my listed hopes. Though broad, they’re typed out now. They’re on the page. They’re manifested. I have written on this January 1st. I have begun.

I hope you begin, too.