December 2025: New Stories and Reviews
It’s been a busy month of writing and publishing. Let’s get into it!
Writing
I have two new stories out this month, and they’re both a lot chunkier than my prior work:
When the Black Wind Blows is a haunting story about a pair of criminals caught between the police, the storm of the century, and their own ghosts. It employs a cyclic narrative structure—I’m an absolute sucker for these—and explores cycles of abuse, guilt and remorse, and the longing to escape your most self-destructive patterns.
We Are All Terrorists Now is a supernatural political horror story about a group of fascist vigilantes who raid an antifa coven. This piece was inspired by President Trump’s ridiculous executive order declaring “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization”, and the subsequent NSPM-7 which declares a whole gaggle of widely-held—and frankly quite moderate—views on the political left as indicators of violent domestic terrorism. This is probably my angriest story to date.
I also put out three new book reviews:
And lastly, Affinity went free, and I wrote about how it’s already transformed my workflow.
Publishing
For Shiraki Press, I spent a lot of time finalizing print and ebook galleys for ARCs. This was mostly fine-tuning work on the print layout: fixing word stacks, hyphen stacks, orphans/widows, stuff like that. Our Shiraki Press December update shows an example of this type of edit.
I’ve also been doing a lot of coordination with our wonderful cover artists. We’ve got three covers in active development right now, with three different artists—two of whom are Hugo Award winners—and three very different aesthetics and book styles. I’m really looking forward to doing our first cover reveal shortly after the new year!
Upcoming
I spent a lot of time and energy through November spinning up a social media strategy for my fiction, since writing that’s not promoted tends to be writing that’s not read, and I have a piece coming soon about my experiences with that.
I also have a poetic piece coming in early December, along with a 2025 wrap-up later in the month. Aside from that, I’m largely trying to take it easy on new fiction until after the new year.
That’s all for now. See you next time!