The first kiss of the New Year tasted like coffee!

We didn’t stay up to usher in the New Year at midnight—we go to bed much earlier than that. We turned on our “white noise” machine, with its sound of ocean waves, to filter out the sound of people’s fireworks, which are distressing to my combat-vet husband (apparently firework rockets sound remarkably like incoming Scud missiles), and we cuddled in under the contented bodies of several cats, and we went to sleep.

Ten years ago, when we were courting, we did stay up, and we were slow-dancing in my apartment living room—and then when the ball dropped, so did Jon! To one knee, with a ring—sapphires, for our birthstone, on either side of my great-great-great-grandmother’s diamond. And then we kissed, the first kiss of 2016. Six weeks later, we were married, on February-Lucky-13.

This year we woke up in the morning, and shared New Year’s wishes over coffee, and started 2026 with a coffee-kiss.

I finished one last book, last night, to go on my 2025 tally, though this time I didn’t make my reading goal. I’d set the goal of 310 books because last year I finished 307—but this year I only made it through 290 books. That’s still a happy year’s reading, and the goal itself was largely arbitrary.

This was the first time that my “Year in Books” included a book of my own among the “read”—several of them, in fact. (I figured I get to count it as “read” when I’ve gone through all the work of writing it—that’s more intensive immersion, even, than your usual read…)

I always enjoy Goodread’s “Year in Books” retrospective, showing everything I’ve read in the year. It’s a tour of my enthusiasms, since I tend to go through themes in my reading. Themes, and authors—this year I read series by Laurie R. King, Robert B. Parker, Robert Jordan, Donna Leon, Craig Johnson, Michael Connelly, M.C. Beaton, J.K. Rowling. I went through one patch of reading about India & Afghanistan, and another patch of books on economics, finance, and investing. I read a number of books about the Old Testament, as I wrote my own books dissecting Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, & Numbers. (I’ve sort of stalled out on Deuteronomy…) And of course there were quite a lot of books about sailing, whaling, and maritime history, as I continue to build my own novel set on a whaleship. Overall the reading-list is a fair map of where my brain has been.

At the. beginning of a year I don’t usually contemplate the content of the reading ahead of me; I content myself with setting the numbers-goal. (And that’s really just in fun—I’m not troubled by falling twenty short of my 2025 goal. The main reason for this year’s lower reading-number is that I spent more time writing—and I’m happy with that.) Right now, though, I’m thinking about what I might be reading in this upcoming year. Certainly I’ll continue my run of Robert B. Parker’s “Spenser” books, as I’m about halfway through the series. And Robert Jordan is sort of always going on in the background, in the form of audiobooks I listen to when I’m doing dishes or pulling weeds or driving to the grocery store. His “Wheel of Time” is a series of 14 books, at about 800 pages apiece, and I usually cycle through the full series at least once a year in audio format.

And it may be time to turn my thoughts back to Moby Dick.

I’ve taken a break of several months from working on—or thinking about—my whaling novel, and I’m feeling like it’s time to go back to it. I’ve written the first three-quarters or so, and the end, but there’s a missing stretch still to write. And I’d been working on tightening it up, because it’s already rather longer than I’d intended. (If it seems contradictory to be planning both to write more and to shorten the total, well, welcome to writing…) Part of the reason I stepped away from it for a while is to enable myself to read it with “fresh” eyes—to edit with a brain that’s not already immersed in its pacing and phrasing. To enable myself to read it as an editor.

The way I see it, access to a professional editor is one of the most important benefits to be had from a traditional publisher. That and the big one: promotion/distribution. I can do a lot of things for myself—I’m quite happy with my own cover designs, for example—but at the end of the day you need someone to read and edit your work who’s not you. I can turn out a manuscript that’s error-free, in the sense of spelling and punctuation and grammar—but I need someone else’s eye and ear for the cadences, the pacing, the clarity, the stylistic choices… It’s why I’m doggedly reaching out to agents, to see if I can get myself represented, to see if I can get myself (traditionally) published. And it’s time to write to a new one—I give each prospective agent two months to respond before I write them off and move on to another. To this point I’ve at least gotten responses (albeit negative ones) from the agents to whom I’ve reached out, but this time it’s silence.

Fine, I’ll move on.

I’m not much of one for New Year’s Resolutions… but I AM one for making plans! So this year my “plan” is to complete Time & Tide, and to continue reaching out to an agent every two months. There’s a lot that’s outside my control (almost everything, in truth) but those are actions I can take. My 2026 “Year in Books,” like 2025, will be writing as well as reading.

Well, let’s call it a Year in Books-and-Blog.