gods rest ye merry

I am writing this at lunchtime on the last day of work before my Christmas holidays. The tree is up, the lights are on, the dog is snoring, and I have one more meeting to go before the festivities kick off for two weeks. Ahhhh.

This week I handed in the first draft of my manuscript for editorial and peer review. It's due to come out in December 2026. We'll throw it a party. It was a hell of a lot of work to get to this point. It is currently of indeterminate title (aw, I have a genderqueer book - just like its parent...) and cover but as soon as those are pinned down I'll share.

Writing a book has been a massive undertaking, particularly in a year that has contained as many Absolute Horrors as 2025 has. Personally, I spent the first two/three months of the year crawling through words as I came out of a pretty bad mental health crisis and underwent a meds change. I got back in the swing of things, and then FWS dropped on us, and I spent two months working solidly on and around that. I spent the summer on the book, and then research leave ended and teaching picked up again (which has been nice, to be honest - at some point I will write about why I enjoy teaching). So I've been balancing a teaching term, admin work, volunteering, and writing and editing the rest of the book, for the past three months. I am wrecked, lads. I don't often say anything self-congratulatory, but I deserve the bottle of crémant and yards of cheese that are waiting for me this weekend.

I am going to follow this up with an actual blog post about the book and its contents, but for now I just want to say: it doesn't particularly matter what you've done this year, or how you've gotten here.

We got through 2025, which did NOT end us.

Happy Christmas, happy Hanukkah, happy holidays, Nollaig shona. Go forth and eat cake.