New Year’s Update 2025

It’s been a while, huh? The last time I posted a blog, it was summertime. It was still 2024. Now, it’s a whole new year. Time has really just slipped on by.

So, what happened to me in 2024? Why did I basically go dormant for months on end? And, more importantly, what’s in store as we look ahead to 2025?

A Roller Coaster of a Year in 2024

When I was outlining my goals for 2024, I mentioned that I was having a baby. I was taking a year of parental leave because of that, but I was also trying to be cautious about being too ambitious, because I had no idea what was in store for me with having a newborn.

Turns out, I was still way too ambitious. I had plenty of time on my hands, but I also didn’t. For the first few months, Baby was basically attached to me. Then we got into separation anxiety and other fun stuff.

Yeah, I have a Velcro baby. Trust me, I’ve seen all the videos about how Velcro babies are meant to make their mamas slow down. And, if we look back at my 2024 ambitions, I’m definitely someone who needs slowing down.

We also had struggles: I had some health issues, both antenatal and postnatal, and it took time to recover. There were challenges with feeding my baby, and we had some ups and downs throughout the year. But, for the most part, I have a happy, healthy child, and that’s got to count for something.

On top of the baby’s arrival, my husband also went back to school in the fall, which added yet another layer of complication and busyness for the last few months of 2024. Luckily, Baby is continuing to grow and mature, which makes managing all of it easier and easier for me.

Tragedy Amid Joy

The birth of a baby is a huge event—utterly life changing. Most would call it a joyful kind of change. New life and all that.

And along with that joy, just four months later, my family suffered deep tragedy: my father passed away unexpectedly.

Briefly, my father had been ill for about fifteen years; he had COPD, followed by a double lung transplant and the myriad issues that went along with being a transplant recipient. Everyone in my family had been prepared for a long, slow march to the end with him.

Yet it came suddenly: he was here one day, gone the next.

If you’ve read the blog in the past, you might have noted I’ve talked about my father before—often in connection with music. I’d say I was close to my father; yeah, I was “daddy’s little girl.” I shared a lot of my taste preferences, and even some aspects of my personality, with him.

So I’m feeling this loss deeply. On top of having my world rewritten by becoming a parent myself, I just lost a parent. My world is completely upside-down right now, and I have to navigate it. Eventually, it will become normative again, but I don’t want it to be normal.

I Took a Break

My Velcro baby didn’t convince me to slow down and take a break. The death of my father did. I was supposed to publish a book just scant weeks after he passed. I knew within days of his passing I wasn’t going to meet that deadline, so I pushed the book back about a month. In the end, I took a break from all my socials. It was supposed to be just a month or so, but that hiatus extended months, deep into the fall.

I needed that break though. Writing this now, I’m feeling more confident and more like myself. I’m writing again, and I’m starting those social accounts up again.

Most of all, as 2025 kicks off, I feel like I can handle everything again. Things are manageable. Back in the summertime, everything felt overwhelming.

Refocusing in 2025

Sadly, when push comes to shove, my writing and publishing activities are always the thing that go on the back burner. So when I needed to contend with a Velcro baby and staying on top of the essential chores (cooking, laundry, cleaning) while my husband was juggling school and work and everything else, my writing took a back seat.

It also took a back seat while we dealt with the aftermath of my father passing. While most of the paperwork was easy to complete, there was still the fact it had to be done. And the mourning, the emotional work of grief, is never ending. It comes and goes, in waves, always threatening to drown me.

In short, I am not who I was twelve months ago, and I will never be that person again. That’s true for all of us anyway, but I’m feeling it acutely right now, given the events in my life.

So my parental leave slipped away from me. I got basically nothing done—unless we count surviving. I did a lot of that.

Now toward the end of my leave, I’m finally finding my groove. I’m finally getting things accomplished. I’m frustrated, because I feel like I could have done so much more with the time I had.

But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m still here, and I still have a couple of months of leave left. I’m going to do the most I can with that, whatever that is.

I want to keep moving forward. And I want to write. I want to publish books. Because life is short, and I don’t want to look back and realize I wasted time on things that were utterly inconsequential or unimportant.

Cherry’s 2025 Publishing Plans

With all that in mind, I’m coming into 2025 in a strong position. I have a couple of months of leave yet, as I said, so I’m definitely focused on doing as much as I can with it.

And that is, hopefully, going to be a lot. I’m remaining cautiously optimistic, so I don’t want to announce too much right now. But I can tell you that there will be a minimum of two books this year. In fact, I already have one book up for preorder, so that’s basically guaranteed at this point.

And not to brag, but I kicked off 2025 with three complete manuscripts. So, without jinxing myself, I can say that you will almost certainly see three books this year. One is locked and loaded for the end of this month. The next one will appear in the summer, and there will be on for the end of the year.

Two manuscripts are going to be 2026 releases, so I finally feel like I’m working ahead on things here. Maybe that’s how I finally start delivering on my overly ambitious agenda.

And, if things go well, I also hope to be working on a secret project that may or may not appear later this year. For the moment, though, I’m focused on the next two books in the Flirting with the Zodiac series.

Cherry’s Return to Work Plan

Of course, I’m now staring down the end of my parental leave, which is giving me all kinds of feels. There are a few factors at play though—from childcare to the fact I’m self-employed and my business has basically come to a standstill while I’ve been off—that have me planning for a slower, more gradual return to work in early 2025.

So for the first six months of my return, I’m planning on working part-time, rather than full-time. I’m going to be knee-deep in childcare for those first six months, though, so I’m cautious about being able to get anything done with regard to writing and publishing. And our financial plans often go awry, but my husband and I have discussed a plan for allowing me to use some of my work time to actually work on my publishing and writing activities. Unless I can make the books make money, though, that situation can’t last, and how long it lasts will depend on how quickly I can ramp up my actual job. I’ve already started poking at the business side of things, hoping to get projects into the pipeline, and I know there’s something sitting on my desk for me to wrap up when I get back.

Yet Another Adjustment

So I have plans, but I’m concerned the writing is going to take a back seat yet again, despite all our planning and our best intentions. I definitely hope I can do more than I’ve announced here. I mean, I always want to. And I always hope to. But I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep.

So I’m simply going to keep quiet about my hopes until I can make them manifest. I don’t know what the next twelve months holds. I don’t know what the six months after I go back to work will look like. Even these next two months are a mystery.

So I’m not going to get your hopes up by announcing all these overly ambitious plans yet again. If I keep my hopes secret, then the only person who can be disappointed when they don’t come to fruition is me.

A Look at the Social Side of 2025 Resolutions

Briefly, I’m going to wind down my Twitter (X) account. The social media tools I use finally added BlueSky as an option, but that changed my costs for those tools. That, in turn, means I need to cut costs elsewhere to keep within my budget. And, since the billing is now basically per account or something, I can simply trade my old, unused account on that bird app for the one I’m using on the butterfly app.

I also don’t like new policies on the bird app, especially relating to AI. Most of my network seems to have left anyway, and I’m enjoying BlueSky a lot more. I’m not going to delete the account, and I may post the occasional update there, but for the most part, that account will not be a primary place to get information about what I’m up to, and it’s definitely not a good place to interact with me.

I’m still hoping to add another new channel, and I have some plans around some of the books you’re going to see in the next twelve months to make those channels a reality. So stay tuned for that.

And, of course, my Facebook and Instagram are still active, so you can find me there. Finally, there’s the website here, and of course, you can always sign up for my newsletter if you’d prefer to get once-a-month updates delivered straight to your inbox.

Is 2025 the Year I Actually Get Stuff Done?

And, at risk of being too optimistic or ambitious—as I always am—I’m still toying with ideas for serials, and I’m researching platforms to make that happen.

So, at the end of it all, maybe I am still the same person I was twelve months ago. At the core of it, I remain overly ambitious, overly optimistic. I always want to do more, more, more, and even though I often don’t deliver, I hope you know the intent is always there. The intent is always, always to deliver more for my readers. And I’m grateful you’ve stuck with me, through all the ups and downs, through all the promises and the “oops, I didn’t get that done”s that come after the fact.

Let’s see what 2025 has in store for us.