The Year is 2025...

The year is 2025.

You’re an SFF author just returning from holiday vacation, the lingering effects of a candy-induced food coma making your brain sluggish. You have five major deadlines over the course of the next two weeks. The first of which is before you now: a blank document titled January 2025 Newsletter open on your laptop, cursor blinking, waiting for inspiration to birth words onto the page.

You got nothing.

As happens every December, I start with Big Plans to Make My Year and End On A High Note, and then the universe reminds me that it is December and there are Too Many Things for me to even think of getting half the stuff I planned done. I started the month really busy, slogged through the middle of it sick with a cold, and then ended it on vacation where work is forbidden, thank you very much. So, not the productive machine-woman I was hoping to be, but I do in fact have a bit more than nothing to share with you this month.

Nebula Nominations Are Open

Yes, the award season continues. Nebula nominations opened in December and will remain open for all SFWA members to vote in until February 28th. The fun thing is you can access your ballot now, fill it out, and go back and forth with it from now until the deadline, a helpful feature for folks like me that tend to make our lists and then forget to enter them in.

Anyway, I want to again toss my stories into the ring of your consideration, particularly “They Will Dance Among Planets”, currently on the Nebula Recommended Reading List, and “Draconis astronomus”, a personal favorite of mine that I wish got some more love this past year. You can, as always, find the full list of my eligible works and links to access on my website.

Bingo!

So, the question on everyone’s mind: did I secure a blackout bingo card by end of 2024? Dear Reader, I did not. I was 6 spots short, and we can all thank my cold for that. I could not focus my eyeballs enough for much reading. But award season is still in full swing, so there is time yet! I have tabs open for these remaining squares and plan on getting them filled soon. Keep playing your own cards, friends! Keep shouting about the art you love!

A Look Ahead

So what does 2025 look like? It’s going to be a bit of a shift for me. There were a lot of big changes in my personal life in 2024, and I am hopeful they are leading to a lot of different big changes in 2025, and that will in turn enable me to make some shifts in my writing career, the first of which is a move away from short fiction in favor of longer works.

I am not giving up short fiction altogether. I still have over a dozen shorts that are still out in the Submission Wilds in need of a home, and I will be participating in a flash fiction contest for the first two months of the new year. But rather than short fiction taking up 100% of my focus, it is now going to be closer to a 60/40 split in favor of longer works: novelettes and a novella/novel (silly thing hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet). This is a move I have always planned to make, a couple years later than I had wanted, but that’s life.

Additionally, I am going to look into some things that will impact how I interact with you, dear readers! Website/newsletter hosting, social media interactions, etc. The goal is to take my time with that stuff, do my research, and make any transitions so seamless no one even notices. But, if there is anything to report, I will of course update you here.

And that’s it! 2025 is starting off relatively quiet, and given how 2024 ended, I am grateful for that. For now, let me leave you with the January picture of my new wall calendar, which is one of the most glorious pieces of art I have ever beheld and what I am claiming as my 2025 mascot:

Keep on writing on.

—Catherine