Do you remember this little paragraph from my 2025 Goals: Why I’m Not Making Any post back in January?

“None of this is also to say I can’t one day in a week, a month, a few months from now change my mind and my direction for 2025. For now, though, there are no goals, no resolutions, and no grand plans for this new year.”

Yeah. That one.

It’s incredible how quickly those things can change.

To be fair, this is a post I should have written in February, but February is notorious for being the worst month of the year for me. It’s even harder now since my friend passed away. I barely managed to stay afloat in it this year.

But February has come and gone. Good things have come, and also gone. Bad things have also come and gone.

Do some of the bad things still linger today?

Yeah. Unfortunately. I’m still fighting to find a job after two and a half months of searching. I have some hopes right now, but don’t want to get ahead of myself.

There are also some positives though, some changes in the grand scheme of 2025. Changes that I haven’t fully committed to yet because I am still healing, but I am on my way. I am mentally in a better place finally and I want to scream, “This is what normal is supposed to feel like?!”

My current self would love to throttle my past self for fighting unnecessarily for so goddamn long. It wouldn’t do me any good though. I can’t change the past. I can only put one foot in front of the other.

Which leads me to the future…

If I’m being frank, I haven’t done much of any writing for seven years now. There’s a lot of reasons why: full-time job, part-time college, adulting, and a major break of confidence in myself and my writing because of an ex-friend incident.

And, let’s be honest, the climate of the last decade or so hasn’t been a very encouraging one either. There’s a ton of fear about the future and all of it combined left me in a very low place for a long time now.

But there is hope. There must always be hope, otherwise, what do we have left?

You see, my last post talked about how many pitch events we had during January and February. An insane number of them where I wondered if we’ve been pitch eventing too much. It turns out that maybe we are, but also the sheer number of events provided a lot more opportunity.

I’ve been pitching with my WiP novel since early 2024, wanting to gain friends and followers and honestly needing the confidence boost those events brought. I never had any of the coveted agent likes success though.

Until now…

Something really good came out of those back-to-back events. Something that has changed my trajectory for 2025.

Do I think I can finish drafting, edit, edit some more, do all the agent research, and be query ready in nine months for the start of 2026? Or at least be ready with the first few months of 2026?

I’m probably pushing my luck, but suddenly that’s what I’m aiming for.

Not just because of some good news out of those events (which I’ll talk about in another post to come), but also because I’m actually starting to feel a drive and excitement for writing again. The other night, as the Writing Community geared up for another pitch event, I caught myself thinking, “I can’t wait to add ‘is querying’ to my handles.”

I. Can’t. Wait.

Those are words I haven’t spoken, let alone thought, for a very, very long time. And I don’t think any of y’all can understand how emotional that is for me.

I am healing. I am finding my way back to a version of me that I can be happy with. I’m even reading a ton again. It just took time and the right tools.

So, yeah, I’m now aiming to have this novel query ready by early 2026. Maybe I’ll stretch that a little bit since there does seem to be magick in the air for querying at the beginning of the year, but that’s the new “goal.”

It really is incredible how quickly things can change.