The relentless passage of time bringing anyone else down?
Somehow, we have zoomed to the end of another year, one in which I have been lax at blogging. This is partly because I have been super busy with classes and workshops and new plays that we will discuss in upcoming posts. And also because AI is ruining everything we hold dear and we can no longer have nice things.
As for the second one, I’m trying to rethink how to blog in the post-AI world and, In the short term, it means I’m mostly sticking to news and updates and boring announcement-y stuff.
In the long term, I plan to set up a membership plugin. It’ll be free to join, just a way to keep content behind a login so it isn’t an AI scrapers free-for-all. It’s not ideal for anyone, but since AI protections are taking forever, it’s the only way I can think of to be able to share excerpts, articles and the kind of posts I used to without having to risk my writing getting gobbled up by the plagiarism machine.
But I think those of you that enjoyed having a closer look at my writing process and what was going on in my life will appreciate being able to get that again, especially since it will be in a much more exclusive and intimidate space.
Plus I have some ideas I’ve been dying to experiment with, exclusive stuff I want to let members test out for free (such as classes, commissions and writing requests) before I start charging or open them to the wider public. Should be fun so stay tuned!
What did I do all year? Write, mostly. It was funny to go through my old blog posts, especially back when I lamented how people ever wrote over a million words a year. This year was my fifth time of surpassing a “millwordy” as they call it (the year’s not over yet but I’m over 1,350k words already).
What am I writing in all those words? Well, that’s the tricky part. Some of it is non-fiction and writing classes and plays and the usual stuff I write and the rest… well… you know, when I set up that private membership only space we’ll talk about it. 😉
Generally? Life is a lot, but I’m hanging in there!
Anyway, some quick updates before we all leave 2024 behind us…

- Did I ever tell you that a quote from one of my plays was the nationally syndicated Cryptoquote? I only found out long after the fact but this was very funny to me.
- Vardiello is officially available from Brooklyn Publishers, check that out here.
- Eagle eyed readers will notice that TWO new plays have appeared on the Works page. Why didn’t I lead with them? Because I’ve got a cool contest to promote their release that I will be announcing soon.
- You’ll also notice that I redid the graphics for The Raven / Lenore. The graphic I had for that play I threw together super quick in December 2019 until I had a chance to make something better and then there was a global pandemic and, well, that’s how long it took me to have a chance to make something better. Sometimes life is like that. But the new one is far better than the old one so you should take a moment to ooh and aah over it.
- If you peeked at that events page I linked above, you also probably noticed I have a TON of classes scheduled for next year. They’ll get their own post too.
- I’m on Bluesky now! Yes, I too have abandoned X-Twitter during the great exodus. I’m not deleting my Twitter account, just in case someone saves the platform someday, but I’m not really checking it anymore. I have somewhat lost my taste for social media in general these last few years so I don’t know how active I’ll be, but I hope to rebuild some of the friendships I had on Twitter over there!
- I’ve had to change my mailing list service a bunch of times since I last sent an email so it’s not a bad idea to make sure you’re signed up as I’ll be sending out a message soon.
- Remember how I started tracking my “Writing Year” in December back in 2016? Well, while that strategy served me well for nine years but with 2025 I officially go back to tracking writing along with the normal calendar year. A bit of a mental adjustment. It’s for a lot of reasons but mostly because it’s just easier to sync up with the normal calendar for all the various group writing challenges I’m in.
- This is a small personal victory no one cares about but after living here for nearly 8 years, we finally got the shelves for my office over here and have begun to unpack! I am sooo excited to be able to have places to put stuff instead of living out of boxes!
- I’ve been working on the website. Lots of little cosmetic fixes. Sexy new Events page. Went through and deleted or privated a lot of cringe older blog posts with broken links or from the early 2000’s when I used to use this space more like social media than a proper blog. Should probably do that with more posts when I have the time.
- Disqus has been ticking me off for a while so I finally exported everything from it and removed it for good. We’re back to good old default WordPress comments which will hopefully make chatting simpler and easier. Leave a reply on this post to check it out!
- Aside from my four most recent releases, the project pages look very super terrible. That’s because I’m in the middle of changing them over to match my new design but it’s time consuming so I’m only getting them done here and there as I can. Pardon our dust as I work my way through them.
- Also dusty is the fact that I redid all my blog categories. Long story short, I wanted to focus on less categories and then use tags to refine things since the number of categories was getting out of control. Because this blog is huge and I used a bulk tool to do this en masse, some things probably ended up in the wrong categories so I’ll try to fix things as needed. But here’s a quick breakdown of what’s where in case you’re trying to find something…
- Announcements: Same as before, this is anything timely or newsworthy like contests, sales, giveaways, new releases, etc.
- Classes and Workshops: As I’m teaching more often than ever before, this will collect all the info about classes taught by me and others.
- Evergreen: This one’s mostly for internal use, but it’s all the posts that are general advice and content that never expires so it’s always relevant.
- External Stimuli: Books I’m reading, media I’m consuming, random things that interest me and refill my creative well
- In Their Words: Guest posts and quotes
- Me, but Elsewhere: media appearances, reviews of my books or plays, appearances on podcasts or other websites
- On Writing: Craft and Commiseration: This is a catch-all category for all writing posts, but, since most of what’ I write about on this site is writing’s on this site is about writing, it’s broken down into sub categories thusly…
- 4TheWords: 4TW is a writing game that I play. I’m an official affiliate now so I’ll be sharing more tips about how to play the game.
- Living the Writing Life: Probably the biggest change, this new category absorbs all the different categories that gave you a look into my personal writing process. Categories like Works in Progress, Word Count Updates, My NaNoWriMo, My Writing, etc all collect into this one category. There are no longer categories for every one of my books, plays and WIPs as those have all become tags. (It’s a good problem, I guess, that I have written too much to sustain a category for everything!)
- My Writing: This is for my writing aka excerpts, articles and my published works.
- NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month): This is not just every post I’ve written about NaNoWriMo, but also everything I wrote about its now defunct sister event Script Frenzy (Screnzy). Yes, I’ve broken ties with NaNo permanently after the change in ownership, but there’s still A LOT of old content on this site that I’m not going to just delete, esp since most of it applies to drafting of any kind. That said, I’m planning to redo some of my more overt NaNo-adjacent content (*cough*) in the future so keep an eye out.
- Playwriting and Theatre: Self explanatory I think.
- Writing Advice and Resources: This one is new so it’ll take a little while to fill it up, but it’s for posts like my kanban series that were written specifically to inform or that people might want to reference later.
- Personally…: Updates that are just about me and my life.
Whew! People think being a writer is mostly about writing, but it’s really about constantly having to fix stuff on your website that you broke while fixing something else.
Anyway, that’s just a quick catch up from me, hoping everyone had a good 2024 and that 2025 is good to us all!
PS: featured image made lazily in Photofunia because I didn’t have anything else that really worked