Hello friends! It’s been a while since I posted here, but once again I’m trying to rectify that in the new year. Starting with a quick roundup of my 2024. Or not so quick, as it turns out.
2024 was a rough year for me. I spent most of it at home in New Hampshire, spending time with and helping to care for my mother as she battled brain cancer. She passed away at the end of July, and while it has been such a terrible loss, I will always treasure all the time I got to have with her in her last year.
I returned to the D.C. area in August, and since then I feel like I’ve been trying to rebuild my life around all my grief. I’m working in the office two days a week again, and I’ve been getting back into tandem biking. I’ve most enjoyed being able to see my D.C. friends more regularly, and I have been so grateful for all their support over the past months.
But even after losing my mom and moving back to my apartment in the D.C. suburbs, 2024 wasn’t done serving up big life changes.
In October, I stumbled upon a perfect house in D.C. proper, and I put in an offer. They accepted, we closed in two weeks, I got out of my lease before it renewed, and my dad and uncle helped me move. Friends I have a house now! And I have loved making it my own. I finally have a place for all my hardcopy Braille books and my big writing desk from my room in New Hampshire. I’ve turned one of the bedrooms into a library, which I’ve decorated with an outer space theme. I call it my space library and I love it!
I also love the neighborhood—I’m just a few blocks from the metro, but it’s still residential, and there’s a great little independent bookstore near me and an actual Italian restaurant and everything—and also all my new neighbors, who have been so kind and welcoming! It’s a huge change to go from an apartment building where people just said hi or maybe ventured a comment about the weather in the elevator to a neighborhood with regular block parties and an active group chat where everyone is always helping each other out. Seriously, one of my neighbors just texted to tell me he’d salted my steps for me, with pet friendly salt, ahead of the snowstorm that’s coming through tonight.
But wait! There’s more!
Somewhere between my knee surgery at the beginning of 2023, the year at home with my mom, and the move back to D.C., Neutron let me know that he didn’t want to work as much anymore. I applied for a new dog at Seeing Eye and once we were back in D.C., I’ve been slowly phasing him out of working and into retirement. We took our last trip together with him guiding me home to New Hampshire for the holidays. He was his usual flawless pro through the airport. We even managed a revolving door—perfectly I might add!—for the first time since we trained together in 2017. I am going to keep Neutron as a pet, and hopefully he will have many years ahead full of snuggles and sunbeams and long walks and frantic tail wags.
At the end of November, I got the call from Seeing Eye that they have a new dog that’s a match for me, and they invited me to come back to their campus to train with that dog in the January class. I am actually writing this post in a hotel in New Jersey, because I had to come up a day early because of that big snow storm. So while 2024 was packed full of big life changes, they’re still coming in 2025. I’ll be starting the year with a new partner by my side. One of my writing group friends is watching Neutron for the next couple weeks, and she reports that he is enjoying himself immensely.
As you might imagine, with one thing and another, reading and writing both took a bit of a backseat this past year.
I had a hard time working on many of my ongoing writing projects, as suddenly so many of them seemed to be about grief—past, present, or future. But I still needed to write. That’s the thing about writers. If we don’t write, we go a little crazy inside. And so I returned to my roots and started writing poetry. I kept a journal of sourts in poems this past year. I don’t know what I’ll do with it, if anything, but it will always be special to me. Those poems helped me to express all my feelings and also helped me rediscover my love of writing poetry, something I’d long convinced myself I was bad at.
It’s only been in the last few weeks that I’ve turned back to writing fiction, and I have at least one project that has grabbed me by the heart and won’t let go. I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to write a story that feels like it’s writing itself and I’m just transcribing it, that feels like it is the only thing in the universe that matters right now, even though of course there are other things, like your job and your dog and the dishes that matter too. I’ve really built up some momentum and made progress in the last few weeks, and I have some bbig plans for finishing up some of my many unfinished projects in 2025.
But while I wasn’t writing much, I did continue to submit short stories to magazines, and I’m excited to share that I have two short stories that have been accepted for publication in 2024. “Éclairs for Elodie” is about grief and baking and memory, and it will be published by Abyss and Apex. and “Born in Flame and Song” is about destiny and sacrifice and family and belonging and music and, you guessed it, grief (I have a theme going I know), and it will be published by Cast of Wonders. I wrote “Éclairs for Elodie” in 2022, and “born in Flame and Song” in 2021, despite the theme that has unfortunately become all too relevant to my life this year. But I’m so excited for you all to read them soon, hopefully this year!
As for reading in 2024, I had a hard time focusing much to read a lot. I kept starting books and struggling with them and then putting them down. 2024 was the year where I embraced putting books down if I wasn’t enjoying reading them. Too much else was hard to struggle with something that should be bringing me joy.
I reread a lot of old favorites this year. Of those, revisiting Catherynne Valente’s Fairyland books was I think the best comfort read I could have asked for.
Of the new books I read this year, only a few stood out to me as really extraordinary in one way or another.
- Glowrushes/Lo Stralisco by Roberto Piomini: beautiful, moving, haunting, I read it both in English and Italian early in 2024 and it has clung to me ever since
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery: do I understand it? Not at all. Do I love it? Yes!
- The Swifts series by Beth Lincoln: the back cover describes it as Knives Out meets Lemony Snicket. Need I say more? These were delightful mysteries full of heart, humor, and a healthy amount of wordplay. I really hope the series continues.
- The Redhead of Auschwitz by Nechama Birnbaum: a true story that was incredibly poignant and powerful and has stayed with me
- The Yellow Bird Sings by Jennifer Rosner: Another WWII/Holocaust book, this one about a part of the war I didn’t know much about
- This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone: I can’t even describe this one, but if you haven’t read it, go read it! Go read it now!
- Plotting the Stars trilogy by Michelle A. Barry: magical school in space! Magical school in space! Magical school in space!
- The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy by Anne Ursu: found family, mysterious boarding school, conspiracies, beautiful writing, what more could I want?
- The Midnight Orchestra and the Dark Refrain by Jessica Khoury: the second and third books in the Mystwick School of Musicraft series. Don’t get me started, or I’ll never shut up about these books.
- Castles in Their Bones trilogy by Laura Sebastian: Laura Sebastian does political intrigue in a really comprehensible and also human way. In this series we have three sisters raised to conquer the kingdoms their mother is marrying them off to, battling their love for their mother and their homeland with their love for each other and also their betrothed (oops that wasn’t part of the plan) and a long ago prophecy that could ruin everything. This was another series that pulled me in and wouldn’t let go, which was just what I needed.
I’ve added these titles to my book recs page, where you can also see my other favorites from years past.
And that’s it for 2024. I think it’s enough, don’t you?
As for what’s ahead in 2025, I’m starting training with my third Seeing Eye dog tomorrow, and I’m going to try to post daily updates on this blog. We’ll see how long I keep it up, given how busy the training schedule is, but I’m going to try.
Once I’m back from Seeing Eye, I do hope to return to posting about what I’ve read each month, and I’m also planning to do a monthly post on some kind of writing topic.
For writing, I’m aiming to make significant progress on, and hopefully finish, at least two of my unfinished projects this year.
And I’m aiming to read 50 books in 2025, with one of those books a month being in Braille.
I’m also going to try to cook at least one new recipe a week, because cooking is something I really love that I haven’t done as much of as I would like in the last year, what with one thing and another. Maybe I’ll post about that too.
On the whole, I’m crossing my fingers for the next year to be relatively more settled than the last couple. I could use a few months of nothing but exploring the city, meeting up with friends, and snuggling my dogs in my new space library.
Happy 2025 friends!