Man was this an unusual year for me and publications.

Not the part where I didn’t have a novel out. That’s happened before, and it will again, thanks to the vagaries of scheduling; I have years with multiple novels out which more than make up for it.

And not really the part where I only published two short stories, thanks to a drop-off in my production of new stories (after an absolute flood of short fiction writing for a few years prior). Those are:

• “The Poison Gardener” (Sunday Morning Transport, paywalled)
• “Mrs. Patterson’s Home for Landlocked Men” (Flash Point SF, free to read online)

No, the unusual part is where I published EIGHT POEMS in 2025. There are plenty of poets who outpace that, but for me it’s a lot! All are either free to read online, or out of their period of exclusivity so I have made them available myself:

• “Hermit of the Crossroads” (terza rima, Haven Spec)
• “Among the Briars” (villanelle, Rialto Books Review)
• “Axis Mundi” (inverse mirror fib, Eye to the Telescope)
• “Story Sits in Places” (rhyme royal, Worlds of Possibility)
• “Hallucination” (free verse, Merganser Magazine)
• “Cutting the Cord” (rhymed quatrains, Small Wonders)
• “The Great Undoing” (modified sonnet, 4LPH4NUM3R1C)
• “Our Rewards” (villanelle, Merganser Magazine)

. . . actually, I published nine poems, but one of them is a piece I tucked into one of my own self-pubbed collections as a bonus piece. There were two such collections this year:

• The Atlas of Anywhere (secondary world fantasy; a “sequel” of sorts to Maps to Nowhere)
• A Songbook of Sparks (stories based on folksongs; a “sequel” of sorts to A Breviary of Fire)

So that’s it for 2025! I have three things slated to come out in January, though — a short story and two poems — so I’ll be hitting the ground running next year. Let’s see what else 2026 has in store!