Annual Roundup, 2025

Honestly, I don’t know how it can be the last week of December again. It seems like yesterday that I wrote my annual roundup for 2024, yet here we are, with Christmas in the rear-view mirror and Old Father Time already with one foot out the door to clear space for that baby with 2026 emblazoned on the scarf around his neck.

This was in many respects a great year for me. I settled into retirement, combining editing projects—some academic, many fictional—with my own writing. As a result, I managed to publish Song of the Steadfast (long delayed by other commitments and my difficulties in understanding what that particular set of characters would and could not do) in June. I wrote at least four drafts for Song of the Silk Weaver, the last of which is out with my writers’ group waiting for them to give comments in January, after which I will integrate those changes and produce a final version. With luck, that will appear in mid- to late spring.

While waiting, I’m drafting Song of the Sleuth (Songs of Steppe & Forest 8) while tossing around ideas for Song of the Silenced—the next, penultimate book in this series. The preliminary draft of Sleuth is vital, because despite doing more initial plotting than I normally bother with, I have to ensure that the story flows naturally out of Silk Weaver, since it involves many of the same characters a few years later in their lives. If I need to change something in the earlier book to make the sequel work, before publication is obviously the time to do that. Song of the Sybil, the last book, also develops out of books 7 and 8, although at the moment I have only the roughest sense of how that might work.

Song of the Sleuth is something of a stretch for me. It’s supposed to be a murder mystery—something I’ve never tackled on my own before (The Merchant’s Tale is a historical mystery, but my co-writer did much of the heavy lifting for that one), despite reading them by the dozens. Not sure how that’s going to work out. The murder, yes, that part’s already plotted, with the necessary number of suspects and a certain vagueness about what exactly went wrong that the heroine can resolve only after time and careful investigation. But the structure seems off, with too much happening before the crucial discovery, so once I get the story into my computer, I’ll have to go back and figure out what gets cut, what else gets moved, and what needs to be added or changed so that the whole not only makes sense but also draws readers in by making them care one way or the other. But that’s the fun of writing, after all. Doing the same thing over and over would bore me to tears.

Beyond that, I hope for more editing projects in the new year, but also visits to family and perhaps some decisions about—or at least research into—where Sir Percy and I might want to spend our golden years. Now, if only I could wave a magic wand and have all my possessions slot themselves into boxes and fly off to their needed designations. The books, especially, could fill a small library. So we may just have to stick it out where we are and hope for the best.

Last but definitely not least, I hope to keep talking to other writers about their books as well as continuing to plan and produce my own.

So Season’s Greetings, and bring on 2026!