What I'm Most Excited About in 2025

Jazzy creative energy heading into the new year

It’s not that I’m against new year’s resolutions, it’s that these ideas for reform tend to come to me throughout the year, not just at the end of December.

Certainly, I resolve to be better. I’d like to be a stronger writer, I’d like to adopt a writing discipline that generates volumes of work of which I’m proud. I’d like to live more fluidly, relying upon intuition to drive daily decisions.

I’d also like to travel the world, get a publishing contract, cook like Ina Garten and have a vast social network. But these are not SMART goals I can strive for at this point in my life. So, I’d rather look ahead to what I’m most excited about and dedicate my energy to preparing for and making the most of each one.

• 2025 San Miguel Writer’s Conference

  I have long wanted to attend this conference because of the craft programming it offers (and I won’t lie, I want to visit San Miguel del Allende). Each year, they bring in notable faculty and keynote speakers whose works I admire and from whom I can learn a lot about the creation and promotion of my writing. I am using my entire year’s budget for continuing education on this one week in February, so I am going to drink up every minute of the opportunity!

• Teaching Guided Autobiography

  Last year, I partnered with The Shepherd’s Center of Charlotte to teach creative writing to older adults. The most rewarding part of the experience has been to hear the students’ life stories, and to marvel at their capacity for memory, their energy to keep learning and working toward their chosen endeavors. This spring, I’ll be teaching a multi-part course on guided autobiography, a method of writing tiny life stories from prompts. It’s a method I use in character study for my fiction writing, which you can read more about here.

• Writing a new novel

  I’m documenting the process on my Substack newsletter “The Story of a Story.” Follow along and see what evolves!

• Attending my own reading retreat

  This is a dreamy, selfish, luxury I’ve had in mind forever. I’d like to spend 48 hours without any obligation but to read (and feed myself). It requires no formal plan but to have reading material on hand. I’ll wear my comfiest sweats, do no work and simply lose myself in the written word.

• Reading and writing more creative nonfiction

  This year, I read Short Takes, a collection of brief nonfiction writing and I was smitten with both the form and the stories. It inspired me to try writing my own personal essays, which has challenged my writing chops in the best way. When I tend toward fiction, I have to write my way back to truth, which forces me to conjure memory and detail and translate it into vivid, shared experience.

What are you most excited about in the coming year? What will you reflect upon at this time next year?

My hope for you is that 2024 concludes with a sense of accomplishment and an excitement for what’s to come in 2025. Cheers to a new year!