2025 recap: the (writing) harvest is coming in!
AKA: my words were published this year for the first time
Despite my look of concern, 2025 has been a banger year in terms of writing and reading. I had words published for the first time! I wrote more than I have since … ever! I have exciting things lined up!
Some struggles occurred, of course, because that’s just #life, but I’m ending 2025 on a hopeful and proud note. If you’re interested in what I’ve been up to this year, read on!
books & media
It’s been a great year for reading, mostly because I gained access to Libby (thank you loans ♥️ this is a pun) and listened to a lot of audiobooks while commuting and doing chores. I read 80 books, mostly adult fantasy & horror, and yet somehow only knocked out 9 books out of my “25 books for 2025” list. Oops. Better luck in 2026?
my favorite books this year:
Immortal Dark (Tigest Girma) - This one blends vampires and dark academia together excellently. The tension between the Kidan and Susenyos is through the roof, the magic system is fascinating and original, and the prose is luscious without overstaying its welcome. I’m excited (and scared) to read the sequel.
A Certain Hunger (Chelsea G. Summers) - If you’re looking for an unapologetically awful main character who also cannibalizes her lovers … look no further. I loved the biting and sometimes ludicrous (but entertainingly so) voice.
She Who Became the Sun (Shelly Parker-Chan) - Need I say more to recommend this book other than: genderbent retelling of the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty? What struck me most about SWBTS was the depth of the characters, the reflection on gender, and how the author so skillfully weaves together a narrative spanning a multitude of characters and years. (This one made me crash out in a “I’ll never write anything this good” kind of way.)
When They Burned the Butterfly (Wen-Yi Lee) - WTBTB fulfills every bit of the “girl gang with fire powers in 1972 Singapore” premise. The gang warfare is brutal, the girls’ internal politics is dynamic, and the setting feels so gritty and alive. And, of course, the sapphic romance made me feel diabolical emotions. (This one also made me crash out.)
Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries (Heather Fawcett) - I’m not much of a cozy fantasy or cozy anything reader, but I was absolutely, completely wrapped up in this one. The romance was banter-y and fun and funny, and I really loved that the story has faeries being faeries—cunning, nasty, and inhuman—rather than being about mates and growling and blah (you know what books I’m looking at).
Honorable mentions:
Dark Heir blew me away and almost a year after reading I am still on my knees waiting for the next book.
Blood on Her Tongue was genuinely creepy and disturbing (in the best way!) and kept me so riveted that I finished it in two sittings.
my favorite movies & TV shows this year:
Sinners - Black! Vampire! Horror! Beautiful acting, beautiful costuming, beautiful music, and beautiful (and brutal) story. If you haven’t watched Sinners yet … what are you doing?! Go watch it right now.
Weapons - I have some minor quibbles, but I had a blast watching this. The narrative structure was super interesting, everything was deeply unsettling, and somehow at the same time the movie was laugh-out-loud hilarious.
Frankenstein (2025) - Okay, yes, I’m basic and listing movies that everyone and their mom has watched! But Frankenstein was shot so beautifully that it lives rent free in my head and I stop to read every single social media post about it that comes across my feed.
The Man on the Inside - I didn’t watch that much TV this year, hence I’m only recommending one show. This follows a retired man who goes undercover in a nursing home to find a jewel thief, and it’s cozy and heartwarming and hilarious.
writing & beta reading
I managed to draft three whole new books in 2025. Whaaat?! I’m not sure where I got the energy from, and am definitely feeling the tiredness now after finishing book three just a week ago, but I’m grateful for three things that made this possible:
My day job eased up, sort of. Aside from writing on my (long) commutes, I’m getting better at wrapping up work tasks faster to leave time for writing.
I focused on the project at hand. In the past, my ability to draft new projects has been severely impeded by having projects on submission and feeling all those attached emotions. This year I placed all past projects into the “dead to me” or “not my business right now” category, and just focused on the draft in front of me.
I barely spent time on revising. This is not a tip or a strategy, just how things ended up shaking out. HOWEVER I have worked out a new drafting process that I am tentatively saying has revolutionized my first drafts. As in they don’t need major edits to be presentable. Double whaaat?! (I need to collect more results, as in my agent’s thoughts on book 3, before sharing this drafting process.)
Here’s what I wrote:
I started off the year by making another revision on The Book That Just Keeps On Giving. This is not the title of said book, just a long sigh at how revising it has been a Sisyphean task. But! I survived revision #13846 and finally got around to writing a story that I’ve had brewing since early 2023:
Family Mart (YA horror) - An earthquake sends three teens and the convenience store they’re in into an Upside Down-esque parallel reality, where the very landscape hungers for their fear.
((drafted from February - mid March; 78.8k))
I have actually made two posts about the process of writing this book! The first post was when I made a shoddy attempt during during the 24hr novel challenge in 2023. None of those words were retained. The second post was about how I drafted this book in 6 weeks and the joys of imperfection.
Once I finished Family Mart, I printed it out, sat down to reread and plan edits … and then simply didn’t. Oops. I still believe a messy first draft can ignite great revision ideas, but I wasn’t feeling enough love for Family Mart, or for YA in general …
And I had a shiny new idea, one that captured me even while I was wrapping up Family Mart and that my agent agreed had a bit of a time limit (as in publishing trends can come and go).
Enter:
Dark Academia Horror - [pitch redacted]
((drafted from late March - May; 108.2k))
Sorry! I’m being secretive on this one. All I’ll say is that it has my favorite elements of dark academia: real & grueling academia, a codependent & toxic friend group, and rage against the institution … spiced up with some gore and psychological dread.
From the beginning, I knew exactly what I wanted to say with this story, and so the plot and characters kind of just … fell into place. One day, I had the initial idea. One month later, I was sending my agent a synopsis. After finishing Family Mart, I took a three day break before beginning to plot this dark academia horror. I finished the first draft in two months, then I brushed it up a little and fired it off to my agent. Two weeks later she suggested light edits, and I did them in a week … and then we were off!
I do not recommend doing two first drafts back to back like this! I was very tired! I spent the next three months mostly recuperating and noodling around with synopses for a couple more book ideas … but also beginning the research for my next book:
Warlord (adult historical fantasy): The Everlasting meets She Who Became the Sun in a second world, genderbent, sapphic retelling of the life and death of a notorious Chinese warlord, told from the perspective of her concubine after her death.
((drafted from September - December; 116.2k))
The idea for Warlord first struck me in 2023, but I couldn’t figure out how to approach the story and wrote a short story version first to test the waters. Even so, all I knew was that I didn’t want it to be a straightforward political fantasy, and it wasn’t until late 2024 that I figured out how the story should be told.
(As in, I decided to make it literary af and not easily marketable, hahaha! Love my life. Love publishing. Why couldn’t my brain just say “romantasy”?)
Anyway. Marketability aside, I was super excited, but also daunted by the amount of historical research required. Which is why I wrote Family Mart first, then the dark academia, before tackling my stack of research books. After all that and putting together a 46-page world-building & history & research & plot master document, I began drafting, and finished Warlord draft 1 in four months.
(“And finished Warlord draft 1 in four months” sounds so smooth! I crashed out at least 10 times because I felt certain everything was going to collapse around me.)
Crashouts aside, I’m really proud of Warlord. It’s the most complex and ambitious book I’ve attempted yet: dual POV, timeline shenanigans, second world, history-based, and tragically romantic. As always, more work will be needed, but for now I’m going to focus on the warm, fuzzy feeling of turning a concept into a readable book.
Finally, I also dashed off three short stories:
Euploea (eco-horror flash piece, 1k) & Now She’s Good Enough (body horror, 2.9k) are both published (!!!) so I’ll describe them in the next section. The third story, #organ wip (5.7k), is a Black Mirror-esque sci-fi about the monetization of human bodies.
My total word count in 2025 was 312.8k.
Last bit for this section: a quick roundup of my beta-reading / critiquing work in 2025:
Full manuscripts: 5.25 (adult horror x2, YA horror x1, YA fantasy x1, adult thriller x1, adult fantasy x0.25)
Short stories: 15
Query materials: 16 (query x5, synopsis x6, 1st pages x4, nonfic proposal x1)
Among these, I donated query packages to the kidlit4ceasefire and we the people fundraisers.
Aside from the above, I am also a 2026 Round Table Mentor and have been having a blast going through submissions! This mentorship is one of the top things I’m looking forward to in 2026.
publications
I’ve been writing for more than a decade, and it hasn’t been an easy process at all. One, two, three books dying or ailing during querying or submission. Short stories getting rejection after rejection. There have been many, many times where I’ve wondered whether my stories would ever see the light of day.
Then, toward the end of 2024, I received my first short story acceptance, scheduled to publish in May 2025, and opening that email was one of the happiest moments of my life. Finally, my words were going to be published!
Somehow, after years of nothing, I received more acceptances, and ended up with five short story publications in 2025:
A River of Moons (SUSPECT) - a surreal fantasy about a girl lost in a lightless land, who must find her lost moon in order to go home.
Euploea (Vellichor Lit; Demeter’s Garden Anthology) - an eco-horror flash piece about a nature spirit’s revenge against the city that polluted her home.
A Tender Harvest (Uncharted Magazine) - a dark fairytale about a witch, a garden where the fruit bear animals, and a ripening monster.
Loose Ends (Factor Four Magazine) - a horror flash piece about a mother going on an odyssey after death to find her daughter.
Now She’s Good Enough (Uncharted Magazine) - a body horror critiquing the beauty industry and toxic East Asian beauty standards, where a girl’s determination to achieve beauty brings on strange changes in her body
I don’t know if it’s simply that publishing one thing makes magazines look at you differently, but it felt that this year I squeezed past some kind of bottleneck and the stories I’d been getting rejections for suddenly found a home—like the writing seeds I’d planted over the past decade ripened all at once.
I’ve also wrapped up the year with one more acceptance, for a horror flash piece that will come out next year with PseudoPod! This is extra exciting because it’ll be the first time my words will be professionally narrated! It’s difficult to introduce the story without spoiling it, so I’ll just offer up the code name #grave and the fact that it’s a sapphic horror with a bite.
I also have more to come … but that is a secret I can’t talk about yet :) If you’re interested in finding out more when the time comes …
life!
It was a somewhat funny, somewhat sad moment when I put together this cute writing group chat 2025 wrapped post and realized I literally had zero life achievements this year. But then my husband reminded me that I am Older than the other people in the chat (ouch) and have pretty much completed the big milestones: graduation, employment, and marriage. So that made me feel both better and worse. Thanks!
But there was still some fun personal stuff going on, such as:
I got a new tattoo! I lovingly think it resembles one of the seraphim in the Hagia Sofia. It also works as a physical reminder for my dark academia book, since I had the inspiration for it the same day I got the tattoo.
I did quite a bit of traveling! Mostly in Taiwan, but abroad as well.
January: a girl’s trip to Keelung, where the schedule was basically just stuffing ourselves with seafood (and seeing a cool cave).
February: a quick trip to Kaohsiung to get my tattoo and do some market wandering with writing & IRL bestie Cath.
May: another girl’s trip to gorgeous Hualian, with sea and sky views galore.
June: an anniversary trip to Sun Moon Lake, where husband and I lounged about in a cute cottage and trekked through a typhoon.
July: reunion with writing besties Romél and Wen in Bangkok! Lots of food, deals with the Buddha, and a faux album cover photoshoot occurred. (Check out Wen’s books: The Dark We Know, a Spring Awakening-inspired YA horror, and When They Burned the Butterfly, mentioned above.)
October: visiting family in Virginia! We walked llamas, stayed in a cute cottage, did a lot of shopping & thrifting, and I got to meet up with another writer friend, Kate. (Check out Kate’s upcoming adult fantasy: Portrait of a Witch Undone, which asks the question: “what if witches did the Isabella Gardner Heist?”)
Finally, toward the end of the year, I went on a writing retreat with Cath and Hayley! We booked a cozy apartment in Jiufen, also known as the Spirited Away town, and aside from writing, we encountered a greedy orange cat and had a great meal in a restaurant on a hill that rattled very loudly around us (it was storming). (Check out Hayley’s Black vampires in Jazz Age Harlem duology, This Ravenous Fate.)
In many respects, 2025 was the best year ever. In other respects, it wasn’t at all. My grandfather passed away in the summer (peacefully, but still), I developed pretty severe insomnia (there was a period where I got good sleep for maybe 1-2 nights a week and sometimes cried because why can’t I just turn my brain off), and my senior cat (14! old buddy) has not been in the best health. Overall, however, I’m ending this year feeling proud of myself and excited to see what 2026 will bring!
I'm so excited for your stories! And can't wait to learn more about your new drafting process 👀