I Blinked and 2025 Disappeared

Well then. Remember earlier this year when I said that 2025 was the year I was going to try to find my spark again? It turns out that it was incredibly hard to do with the world burning down around us. For all of my good intentions, my motivation to even try to find my spark (let alone do anything at all) disappeared entirely. It did start off promising, but I ultimately lost the battle of productivity.

Working was hard. Living was hard. Socializing was hard. Heck, it still is hard. But I’ve made a little bit of a recovery and so I figured I’d write this update while I had the energy to.

I know I’m not the only one that has felt like this, which is a small comfort. It feels sort of pointless sometimes to sit at my desk and write silly stories that may or may not eventually be published—even though art is what gets us through hard times. So I made a bigger effort to get out of my house more and find a part-time job so that my income wasn’t entirely reliant on my creativity. That has been very good for my brain! And when I’m not doing that, I’ve been trying to work on a couple of personal projects that I want to get off the ground.

Usually I feel like my newsletters are part sharing a little glimpse into my life, recommendations, and upcoming projects to talk about. Lately, it feels like there’s less and less that I’ve wanted to put online. But let me give you some Cliff’s Notes from the year and what else I’ve gotten up to:

Travelled for the first time since before the pandemic—I visited Moncton, Montreal, Calgary, and Vancouver throughout the year. Moncton and Calgary were for comic cons, Vancouver was part work/part play, and Montreal was purely a trip for fun.
Visited my hometown for the first time in…uhhhh, a lot of years. And I did a signing at the Kingston Indigo, which is in the mall that I used to work at in high school. A real full circle moment for me.
Forest of Reading in-person ceremony: for the first time, I got to attend the in-person ceremony for the Forest of Reading awards. Pillow Talk was nominated in the White Pine category, and although it did not win, it was incredible getting to see the number of people who turn up for the event.
Racc Pack: Bins Break Free is announced and up for preorder! That’s right, we’re doing a third book in the series, and it’ll be available on April 26, 2026. It would mean the world to me if you could support it, whether that means preordering it or letting your local library know that you’d love for them to get a copy or two in.

Okay honestly, that was mostly it, now that I think about it…the rest of the year was freelancing, school and library visits, and trying to get myself into a routine (unsuccessfully.) But I did watch, read, and play as much as I could so I’ll do a bit more of a summary of that here:

Books of Note:

In no particular order, here are some of my favourite reads from this year (that weren’t necessarily released this year…)

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow – while this list is not in any particular order, this book (however) is exactly where I intended it to be as my absolute favourite read of the year. This was perfect in every way for me, and while I read an advanced reader’s copy of it, I will be adding a physical copy to my shelf ASAP.
Shark Heart: A Love Story by Emily Habeck
Play Nice by Rachel Harrison
The Wedding People by Alison Espach
Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant
Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher
When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy
The Crescent Moon Tearoom by Stacy Sivinski
Slewfoot by Brom

Games I Played:

I only played on my Nintendo Switch this year, which is pretty wild for me. And you’ll see that I wound up playing what was essentially several different versions of Stardew Valley.

Wylde Flowers (Stardew but witchy)
Roots of Pacha (Stardew but ancient civilizations)
Moonstone Island (Stardew but what if also Pokemon)
Hades II (Stardew but…just kidding, this is the exception here)
Tiny Book Shop (and finally, this one is definitely cozy but not explicitly Stardew-esque)

All of these games are ones that I highly recommend, especially if you happen to also enjoy Stardew Valley.

TV I Watched:

Okay, this was a lot…especially since the last time I updated y’all so brace yourselves. I’ll start with some mindless reality TV that I enjoyed but didn’t ultimately make a massive impact such as Love is Blind S8-9 (always so messy), The Ultimatum S2 (also so messy), The Valley S2, and the entirety of Selling Sunset (addictive mess). And then of course stepping it up in the reality TV category were The Traitors S3, Great British Bake-Off S15, and I think this is more gameshow than reality TV, but Taskmaster S20, which continues to be flawless.

Earlier this year, we got a Dropout TV subscription, and have watched so many shows. Some faves include: Game Changer, Smartypants, Make Some Noise, and specifically the Spencer (Lisa Gilroy, pictured below) episode of Very Important People. But you truly can’t go wrong with pretty much everything on their channel—bonus points for being the only subscription service that I feel good about having because of their profit-share system for everyone involved.

Next up, I started my journey into watching Star Trek finally! I haven’t dug into the OG material but I sat down and watched all of Discovery (except for the fifth season, which is weirdly not available on the network that I watched the rest of the show on), and Strange New Worlds. I do think that at some point, I’ll try to watch more too.

For animated TV, I started watching through all of Adventure Time, got back onto Bob’s Burgers S13, and I adored the first season of Haunted Hotel on Netflix.

In the fun watch/sitcom-ey type TV, I checked out The Franchise (which was fine), Righteous Gemstones S1-2 (still working through the rest of the series), The Residence (RIP, this show was so good), Abbott Elementary S3-4, Adults S1, and North of North S1. My partner and I also started a watch-through (/rewatch for me) of The X-Files. So that’s been a good time!

And finally, let’s call this next section prestige TV: The Bear S3 (ehh), White Lotus S3, Severance S2 (!!!), Adolescence (truly felt that this was incredibly overrated), Hacks S4 (a masterpiece), The Veil (fun but ultimately forgetable), and The Diplomat S3 (rude of this show to continually leave us on cliffhangers). Last but certainly not least is Somebody Somewhere, which I watched the entirety of in the span of a week. A perfect, beautiful, emotional joy of a show that I think everyone should watch.

I wish I had watched more movies this year, but my attention span has (and continues to be) tenuous at best, which means I mostly watched TV…even if I inevitably binge it for hours. But that being said, some highlights for me included:

The Substance
Conclave
Anora
Flow
KPop Demon Hunters
Mickey 17
Frankenstein

I don’t write reviews of the films I watch anymore (having done that for a significant portion of my life), but if you’re curious about what else I checked out, you can visit my Letterboxd page.

This update was still pretty lengthy (considering that I didn’t feel like I had much to share), and if you got all the way here, I appreciate you. Thank you for reading all of this, being interested in what I have to say, and following what I have going on.

Obviously I’ve been pretty inconsistent with updates, and I won’t promise that things are going to change. If anything, I feel pulled away from the need to be online more and more, but I do like sharing things here when I’m up for it. I hope that the rest of 2025 is kind to you, and I wish all the best to my friends, family, following, fans, etc. (basically all the f’s in my life, which sounds rude on principal) through this holiday season and beyond. Be kind out there, try to make life a little easier for everyone around you, and I hope that in turn, things are a little easier for you too.

SOCIALS:

As I’ve said, I’ve been less active on socials lately, but if you want to follow me online, you can find me:

Stay tuned for more updates and info in the future.

Until next time…