Reading Report: December 2025

I'm writing this in the train station waiting for my very (very, very) delayed train. Delays are part of life, I never feel like I'm making my own deadlines. I think in the next year I'm not going to sweat getting there a tad slower, as long as I'm getting there. Lots of interesting bits in this one, if you liked something, let me know in the comments. And a huge thank you to everyone who has subscribed this year! It really means a lot to me to know people are reading all of this. Here's to more writing about writing about writing in 2026. Happy reading! ~EM

Writing Bits and Bobs

• WriterUnboxed - Donald Maass on adding color commentary to your fiction
• DraftingThroughLife - 5 essential strategies for writing more
• Jane Friedman - The case for shrinking your novel

End of Year Flow

• Try a Yearly Theme instead of a resolution you won't keep.
• Courtney Milan - Seal Flow

"I am both a person who felt like I did nothing in law school and got ridiculously good grades and also a person who failed out of college twice. I am economy of motion and also a big old blob of ambulatory seal meat. Both are necessarily part of me..."

• Sabletone - Creating an Evening Rhythm

"Shadows stretch across the walls as the sun exhales its last golden breath, and a single candle flickers awake. You draw your journal close, fingers grazing its textured cover, and for the first time in hours, the day loosens its grip. The room offers you not another task or obligation, but a quiet return to yourself—a small aperture in time where your breath slows and the world recedes."

• Amanda Litman - A Year of Saturday Dinners

“A true & earnest thing: Despite the fact that I live & breathe politics professionally, voted in two elections, subscribe to lots of media, engage in political discourse, and gave to campaigns, I think our weekly dinners may have been my most meaningful political act of the year.”

Longreads

• Wrecka.ge - Landslide: A ghost story - one of the most interesting things I've read this year. Starts with an earthquake ends with some important thoughts for the future.

"Most of the explanations that I think are in my brain are actually dotted lines in the shape of real explanations, but with very little inside them. They are ghosts of knowledge. And I won’t know what I don’t know until I fuck around and find out."

• 92nd Street Y's poetry center has released their entire archive online.
• Chat GPT is Eating the World - Stay up to date on the anthropic lawsuits

Short reads

• Kate Francia - 8 cozy knitting SF short stories 
• Transfer Orbit - Table of Contents for December - List of short fiction released this month, lots of free links.

Future Thinking

• Nature.com - Lightfastness of fountain pen inks - tldr: document inks win out over general use inks if you want your words to last
• Duke Law’s annual list of works entering public Domain on Jan 1 - Including Betty Boop, The Maltese Falcon, As I Lay Dying, and the Little Engine that Could.

December books read/reading

• Tears of the Wolf, Oath of the Wolf - Tore through these after Christmas (did I mention I was stuck in a train station for several hours?) extremely necessary viking inflected slowish-burn fluffy murder romance with psychic hounds.
• Driving the Deep, The Scavenger Door, Ghostdrift - the continuation of the Finder series. These were really fun and different and headed nowhere I was expecting. Pom-pom spider aliens! Future Scotland! Found Family!
• All Accounts Settled - the last in the Fred the Vampire Accountant series. A satisfying ending, if perhaps a bit cheesy on the power scale. But that’s in keeping with the entire series. 
• The Sound on the Page - Ben Yagoda interviews 40 writers on how they developed their style. Full review scheduled for early Jan. 
• Started - The Starving Saints - billed to me as lesbian romance surviving a siege (with lots of cannibalism?), best book of the year for several publishing friends
• Started - Meditations for Mortals - from the author of 4k weeks, a one-month read a chapter a day “reset”, nothing revolutionary so far but lots of good reminders 

Accountability

• 4 Chapters of (?) revised on "Lich"
• 1 rejection for "Monuments"
• Fantabulosa! submission still pending.