2025 was tiny bunnies in the yard and a hundred transient blackbirds in the trees, April snowstorms and long autumn walks, unexpected house repairs and too many vet visits (Vesper is fine now, thankfully), and a lot of avoiding the internet and re-reading fairy tales.
This website is overdue for an update. I’m not around enough to understand all the WordPress things anymore. For awhile all of the images vanished and then they all came back particularly large. We’ll see how this post goes. Hopefully sometime in 2026 I’ll be able to sort it all out.
We went to Nightwood at the Mount again this year, first time seeing it with snow which made it even more magical. It has quickly become my favorite end-of-year tradition, wandering through light and sound in the cold.
This year I re-taught myself how to fold origami cranes, to do something simple and quiet and repetitive without any reason beyond having little paper birds where there previously were none. There are flocks of them all over my office now, in colorful piles.
2025 brought the gorgeous Folio Society edition of The Night Circus (illustrated by Cristina Bencina with a new introduction by me), the most vibrant, shiny new edition of The Night Circus from Acrylipics (currently on sale!) and a sparkling tea blend inspired by The Starless Sea from Old Growth Alchemy.
It is possible that there have been additional beautiful things afoot this year that may be arriving in 2026. I remain eternally grateful that these stories continue to be wrapped in such creative, tangible packaging by so many wonderful artists.
I wrote a lot this year.
Not as much as I might have liked, as a number of unexpected time-consuming things appeared along the way, but I have more pages than I did this time last year, and some of them might even end up in the book.
It’s not a book yet. It’s not even half a book. It’s still mostly word soup but maybe there are some sentences floating around in there as the words cling to what might be their proper neighbors.
It’s very hard to write a book right now. Writing has never not been hard for me and now I’d use the typical analogy of pulling teeth but pulling teeth seems fast, at least. It always takes me ages to find my way through a story, and this one feels slower than usual though if I stopped and did the year math it might be average. There’s an analogy in here somewhere about slowly chipping away at a tooth to accomplish the removal but that sounds terrible.
(I had one of those classic anxiety dreams the other night where my teeth were falling out only this time they were made of gold and labradorite, make of that what you will.)
(The entire end of 2025 writing sentiment is expressed in depth and much more perfectly by my friend Chuck Wendig over here.)
I am currently contemplating some different tactics in an attempt to get more words on paper in 2026. Tricking myself back into that creative bubble. Attempting to be more tactile about the whole process. We’ll see how it goes.
Favorite books I read in 2025:
Lolly Willowes – Sylvia Townsend Warner
The River Has Roots – Amal El-Mohtar
The God of the Woods – Liz Moore
Wild Dark Shore – Charlotte McConaghy
The Everlasting – Alix E. Harrow
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter – Stephen Graham Jones
Honorable mention for Cat Nap by Brian Lies which is a wonder. Highly recommended if you like cats, art, art history, picture books or any combination thereof.
It would be unfair to put anything except Blue Prince in this category this year as it is not only far and away my favorite game of the year but easily one of my favorite games of all time.
This is everything I ever wanted in an atmospheric puzzle game, from the art style to the music to the gloriously layered mysteries. There is so much story here to find in empty rooms and red envelopes and clues hidden in plain sight. I love this game.
A large, sprawling mystery of a house is precisely where I wanted to be this year, slowly exploring and marveling and uncovering. I’m on Day 125 and I still have more secrets to find.
And of course I already ordered plush Swim Bird.
Beyond Blue Prince I did very much enjoy Avowed and also Hades 2 though not quite as much as original flavor Hades. I replayed a lot of things this year (new game+ for both Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Elden Ring, started a new Animal Crossing island), I played several games I am nowhere near finishing (Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, Ghost of Yōtei, Oblivion Remastered), I bounced off Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 because I’m terrible at turn-based but I watched lots of it when Adam played it and it deserves every bit of the acclaim, and here at the very end of the year I have become oddly enamored of Two Point Museum even though I am not normally a management sim person, it is a delight.
This year sounded like the Sound Bath playlist on Apple Music and synthwave radio on Lofi Girl and so much Florence + the Machine.
I do (mostly) love Everybody Scream but the Florence album that was on continuous repeat this year was Symphony of Lungs. The original version of Lungs was on constant repeat a million years ago when I was writing The Night Circus, so this album feels both familiar and beautifully different, like revisiting a place that isn’t the same anymore and you aren’t, either, but it feels comforting in its strangeness.
And within that strangeness it’s this track that’s my new favorite, one that I’m not sure I ever even remembered the title of the first time around in those circus days. This one feels like a different time, a different place, a different story in my head.
I will, as usual, not be online that much in 2026 but I will post anything of import here and on bluesky and instagram and I’ll likely still be retumbling pretty things over on tumblr.
Time keeps feeling like it is slipping by, back here in the ice and the snow again, but we hold on to real things as it passes: kittens and love and paper birds, lights in the woods and stories crafted by often-tired human hands.
