The first half of 2025 has come and gone already. How are we already six months in? These last two months especially have felt like they’ve flown by. Halfway through means I have come upon the time for another quarter wrap-up of how my year is going. April went swimmingly. Everything fell neatly into place. May was a bit more of a struggle, but still held a lot of good things. And June…

Ah, June, you did not behave nearly as well on any front.

This quarter wasn’t as packed with pitch events as the first quarter was, which meant it hasn’t brought me anymore goodness on the agent like front. However, these past three months have brought me considerable success in another area, or two.

I’m finding that good things come in threes for me. Three agent likes so far this year, and now three…

Well, you’ll find out shortly.

First things first. Those agent likes I talked about earlier this year did indeed light a fire under my ass to finish this novel of mine. When NaNoWriMo went up in flames last year, a small-scale challenge popped up among Twitter in the Fall of 2024 to replace it. I expected it to be an annual thing only, but they’ve surprised us with not one, but two, events so far in 2025.

In this wrap-up, I’ll only get to talk about the first writing event as the second one takes place in July. Unfortunately, July falls under quarter three of my timeline, so you won’t get the ending of this tale just yet. That first event took place in April, right as I was riding my high of agent likes. WriteToberFest (@writetoberfest), aptly named for an October writing challenge that is as much madness as a drunken Oktoberfest, surprised us with a spring challenge called #WriteToberSpringFest. No set goals. We were given the same flexibility as a Camp NaNo event. The only goal was to “get it done!”

Some things had changed in my personal life in March and I finally had the will and drive to dive back into writing. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so. I was insane enough to hope that I could now actually complete a novel draft in three months even though I’ve barely written anything in seven years. It’s only thirty thousand words a month. That sounds doable, right? Roughly a thousand words a day when I typically average between a thousand and fourteen hundred in an hour of writing. Perfectly doable!

In a perfect world, that is. This world is not perfect.

I set a goal of twenty-five thousand words for #WriteToberSpringFest. Made an accountability thread for my Twitter and Bluesky accounts, set up new Word docs and back up chains, and jumped in. My extended goal was thirty thousand. Since it was my first time back in the saddle in so long though, I decided to give myself some grace and aim a bit lower. It’s a good thing I did.

There were days that made me smile and believe in this novel again. Days I didn’t want to do anything but did it anyways. Days where I couldn’t wait to keep going on a scene! And days that were much harder than others with Imposter Syndrome nipping at my heels again. In the end, I hit my twenty-five thousand goal. Admittedly, only by ten words, but I hit it! If a massive thunderstormnadoburst hadn’t knocked out my power for almost three days at the end of April, I would have done better than ten extra words. I celebrated by buying myself some bougie cupcakes from a local bakery that I have always wanted to try. They were absolutely worth it. I mean, just look at them. Drools.

I kept the momentum going into May by creating my own little challenge, #MakeItHappenMay. Another little accountability thread for the socials with pretty graphics, and another goal of hitting fifty thousand words minimally in this draft. I really wanted to hit sixty thousand and be at that perfect two-thirds mark, but May starts my busy summer season, so again I aimed lower.

And, once again, it’s a good thing I did.

May’s writing didn’t go quite as smoothly as April’s did. The consistency was way off. In an attempt to rectify that lacking consistency, I started to take myself to the library and coffee shops where I would be forced to write because I had no wi-fi. (I’m notorious for not trusting public wi-fi.) I did this on several occasions and knocked out some massive word counts those days, keeping me in the game for my goal of writing another twenty-five thousand in May.

Instead of small passes of writing on a mostly daily basis of a thousand to two thousand words, I did the majority of my writing in three chunk days. I’m not even remotely kidding. I managed sixty-seven hundred words on May 13th, and another thirty-seven hundred words on May 14th for a ten thousand two-day total. I locked in on the last day of May and tried to make a final push for my sixty thousand goal. I did not, in fact, make the insane seventeen thousand words that day that I needed for that, but I did manage ten thousand three hundred. A number that put me over my minimal fifty thousand! Of the twenty-eight thousand words I wrote in May, over twenty thousand of them were written in three days.

Yes, I am aware I’m nuts.

Then June hit… I had started struggling in May for reasons unknown – cue grief rearing its head again – at the time over motivation, but June really kicked off the dying candle flame. I honestly only wrote a couple thousand words last month, and suddenly my goal of proving to myself that I could write a draft in three months went out the window with the storms and rain.

I gave it another fair shot though. I created one more personal challenge, #JustKeepGoingJune (admit it, you sang that like Dory), and set my sights on at least hitting eighty thousand words. Ideally, finish the novel, but y’all already see I failed this one miserably.

Ah well, in those three (more like two) months I had still managed to write more than I had in years. I considered that a win in its own right, even if my goals were forced to shift yet again going into July here. I ended June with fifty-six thousand words and a good portion of a novel that I was again becoming proud of.

Now, I said good things come in threes for me, but obviously this set of three writing months wasn’t all success. So, you might ask, what was my other set of three?

Across Twitter more than Bluesky, you’ll see the odds and ends giveaways pop up from artists, fellow writers, and editors as they hit new milestones or celebrate something and want to pass on the good. Now, I do not consider myself a lucky person. At all. Since I had started physically writing again, I began throwing my hat in the ring for a number of those giveaways. I’d be nuts not to, right?

If you guessed that I won three giveaways in the past three months, you’d be right.

I still can’t believe it myself, but the positivity that came out of those giveaways has really helped the dim, flickering candle flame that was June begin to burn brighter again. My first win came from Mel (@MelJRey) for a first chapter read through at the end of March. I didn’t actually end up sending it to her until the end of April so we’re counting it in this quarter. My second win came from Leona (@leonahwrites) for a query critique and a piece of character art in May. (My first character art! Ahh!) My last, and perhaps my biggest, win came from Kathryn (@KathrynHAuthor) with her monthly June newsletter giveaway. From her I won a big picture critique of the first fifteen thousand words of my WiP.

Between all three of them, there have been some incredibly kind comments and quite a few happy tears shed. I can’t wait to use some of their comments, and the art!, for graphic promos and pitch events, specifically #UnhingedPit, but I’m not going to reveal those things just yet.

They’re coming, I promise. I have plans for this next quarter. Many plans if all things go well in July.

The writing and giveaway wins weren’t the only bright spots of the last three months though. I did join in three other pitch events, #PosterPit, #questpit, and #WIPPIT, with decent success. (I still need to know who bookmarked my #questpit pitch from May. Fess up!) I sat out a decent number of events, too, for varying reasons. I got my first agent follow on Twitter at the end of April! Color me flabbergasted on that one! Then I got the kick in the teeth at the end of May when I got my first agent DM. It was, of course, a scam account. In June, I did a Pride edition for my #WWReborn prompts. I surpassed eight hundred Twitter followers, three hundred Facebook followers, and I finally hit the big four-digit milestone of one thousand followers on Bluesky! I still hardly get any interaction on Bluesky, but hey, I did it. What surprised me the most was the Facebook followers. I get zero interaction there, but for some reason I’m steadily growing?? Make it make sense. I entered a few other giveaways in the last couple weeks of June, too, because I couldn’t resist. And lastly, over the second quarter of 2025 I continued reading in a big way and have finished another sixteen books.

This second quarter may not have lived up to all the hype it was supposed to hold, but it did pretty decent in the end. The positives are still outweighing the negatives. So many people and instances this year are giving me so much hope on this dream again. I’m manifesting that that hope continues into the next quarter and beyond.

You hear that, third quarter? You have some big shoes to fill again.