State of the Metacosm 12/25: 2025 Wrap-Up!

Hey folks, N here! Soooo I skipped some months, huh? Well, there’s a reason for that. This one’s gonna get a bit personal, just a warning. (CW for animal death, but I won’t be going into detail)

Might as well rip off the bandaid. In the last year or so, our senior cat, Kito, was getting sicker and sicker. By midyear we were doing palliative care. We lost him in late Oct. He went peacefully in my arms and spent his last week glued to my lap.

Ha, this year’s been something huh?

We started out fresh off of Booktopia (which, even despite the stress and unknown, was a wonderful experience) and dove straight into Pintopia (which was also fun, if more Fraught because of some backend stuff.) I started working seriously on Project:Freqs.

Then I hit burnout. Had to process that emotionally, pull back and re-evaluate some things in my creative process.

We pulled Everdark, scrapped Book3, and started laying down a new foundation to the main series of books.

I will say that despite the many, many difficult personal things we’ve been dealing with this year, there has also been a lot of positive growth.

I finally started working on a visual novel.

New Everdark Redux Take Fifteen is at about 7k words and has a solid outline for the beginning. If you’ve never struggled with burnout, it’s really tenacious, so I’m being very careful of my mental and emotional health as I pick at it. I am slowly recovering, though. Right now it’s looking like a 2027 release probably, but it might be earlier if I get hyperfixated.

I’m working on a prequel to Everdark focusing on Redd’s time in Federation Earth, which, if I can get my brain to cooperate, will hopefully see an earlier release and give me some time to distance myself from Everdark.

The Nemesis visual novel is over halfway complete and I’m aiming for a Jan finish.

I really feel that all the work I’ve put into refining my craft as a writer these last six months have really paid off, and I kinda can’t wait to introduce the New Writer Me to you guys.

We’ve got a couple of short stories waiting in the wings and a bunch of ideas for more, as well as some other stuff I’m gonna keep close to the hilt til some things are more settled. Let’s just say if things shake out you’ll be seeing a lot more of Metacosm outside the books.

I’m at 220k words for the year, though I probably won’t add more than a couple thousand. (Damn, you can literally see my mental break leading up to burnout in June and how I threw myself into non-Metacosm projects to recover after that)

Change is hard! But we’re pushing through and it’s showing some promise.

I’m definitely going to be starting off 2026 with a much stronger mindset, much clearer goals. All I can do is hope that I can learn enough from the disaster that was this year for it to never repeat again. I had a lot of support and I can’t overstate how invaluable it was to me — A, Aimee Cozza, the folks in the Create My World discord. I would not be nearly as okay as I am right now without them.

I hope everyone’s 2025 went better than mine, and that your holidays (whichever of them you celebrate) are going well. 🖤

As always, we end with an Art from the Metacosm: