My 2025 Resolutions Look A Lot Like My 2024 Ones

At the start of 2024, I had big plans. I was going to finish my works in progress, tackle all the books/games/craft projects I had lying around, and push my writing and TTRPG work out into the world more! 2024 was going to be my year!

Maybe one day I’ll learn to stop saying that…

The year 2024 had other plans for me. A lot happened, but the reason my plans fell apart can mostly tie back to one thing: my mom died after a short run of gallbladder cancer at the end of June. All of my motivation and creative energy just seemed to evaporate as I tried to grapple with this loss and figure out how to live like a functional adult while feeling like my whole world had fallen around me. I tried to keep working on things - and, sometimes, I even managed to get a few things out - but there were many days in the back half of the year where just surviving felt like it required more energy than I had. Whenever I thought I might be getting myself back to solid ground, something would happen that knocked me off my feet again.

After all of that, maybe it’s not surprising that my resolutions for 2025 look a lot like my resolutions for 2024.

I still want to have more of my work come out this year. I want to post things on my Ko-Fi and Vocal pages more consistently, enter more writing challenges, and send out more pitches and submissions for projects and publications than I managed last year. I don’t want to put any expectations on how many will be accepted or rejected, but I want to try. I have a spreadsheet for tracking how many pitches and submissions I send out, and I want to be able to fill it up in 2025.

I’m also still preparing for a big move, but it’s much closer to happening now than it was at the beginning of 2024. With that in mind, I need to downsize some of my stuff. One of the biggest hoards of stuff in my apartment currently is all my crafting supplies, so I’ll also be trying to focus on using up as much of it as I can. I have a lot of projects in my knitting bag and even more in my list of things I want to make, so I’ll be trying to work my way through those, learn some new skills, make some cool stuff, and hopefully have much less yarn and embroidery supplies to try and take with me later in the year.

I also have four main projects that I have been working on for a bit that I am hoping to either finish or make progress on this year: two fiction projects and two tabletop roleplaying game projects.

The first tabletop project is a journaling game inspired by the Tennyson poem, The Lady of Shallot. This is a solo game that uses tarot cards to provide you with writing prompts based on the poem. I’ve been picking away at this one for a while now and the draft is fairly close to being finished and ready for editing. I hope that I’ll be able to finish this game and release it to my Ko-Fi and itch.io shops this year.

The second tabletop project is a significantly larger one. I’ve also been working on a game using John Harper’s paragon system that is inspired by my favourite video game series, Kingdom Hearts. Obviously, I can’t use any actual material from the games (I’m not going to mess with Disney or Square Enix), but I’m using some of the basic premises of the games as well as some of my favourite portal fantasy stories to create this TTRPG. I’m building the worlds based on public domain works and have a pretty fun list of ones I want to include. I’m currently working on an Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland-inspired one, which is one of my favourites. I don’t expect to have this game finished this year, as there is still a lot of work to be done on it, but I would like to maybe at least finish a rough draft by the end of the year.

Moving onto the fiction projects, I have a sapphic mermaid short story I’ve been working on off and on for a while now that I would like to finish. It was originally inspired by a Vocal challenge, but it has grown quite a bit from that original idea. Getting it all written out has proven to be a bit difficult, but I’d like to finish it and maybe start trying to get it published sometime this year.

The final big project I have on the go is a young adult novella! It’s a space adventure with some vibes of Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Guardians of the Galaxy thrown in there. If you remember the little prologue I wrote for a challenge last year, this novella spawns off of that! Cece - the main character - was originally a character I created for a Masks: A New Generation game and she has made several guest appearances in other games I’ve played since then. She is one of my favourite characters that I have created, and I’m excited to explore her in my writing more. I got a lot of great feedback when I posted her prologue as well as a lot of requests for more, so it felt like it was finally time to try and do something like this with her. So far, I’ve mostly been outlining and writing some small scenes and character studies to figure out where I want to go with this story. I’m excited to keep working on it throughout the year and see if I can get a first draft thrown together!

After all the sadness and chaos of 2024, I really want 2025 to be a big year for me both personally and creatively. I’ve felt a bit stagnant for a while now, and I’m both excited and terrified to try and move forward more this year. I hope you’re all excited to join me for it as well.