What I Published in 2025

Hey friends. As many of you have no doubt noticed by now, this past year has been a bit of a turning point for me as a fiction writer. I started 2025 with a newly revised fantasy novel just completed and plans to begin submitting more short stories while in between projects.

I was absolutely unprepared for the amount of success I had in the months (and year) that followed. So please allow me the indulgence of sharing at least a snapshot of what I managed to achieve in 2025.

First, though, I have to thank several people for helping me get to this point. My wife, Melissa, has been a constant supporter, always allowing me to have my “introvert moments” where I spend so much time just pondering new things to write. My editor, Natalia Emmons, helped me co-found our literary magazine, Cetera Magazine, in January and has helped me level up my craft in ways that are kind of difficult to wrap my head around. Bridget Serdock and Will Ashton, who also joined our magazine’s staff, have been amazing critique partners, reading so much of my work with a seemingly endless supply of enthusiasm and encouragement. I’m quite fortunate to have these wonderful people in my corner.

Let’s start with some basic stats.

Overall, I published about 37 short stories on Cetera alone. I published 9 short stories for other outlets, and I have 4 more coming out in 2026. I published 5 poems on Cetera and just 1 for another outlet. In terms of novels, I managed to finish 2 this year—one of them being a literary short story collection and the other being a fantasy novel. I’ll be for sure publishing the collection in 2026, either on my own or with a small press.

I was a finalist for the 2025 BCLF Elizabeth Caribbean-American Writer’s Prize for my short story “Bohike Boy.” I received an honorable mention for the Rhonda Gail Williford Award for Poetry with my poem “The Cartographer’s Daughter.” And I was nominated for Best American Short Stories 2025 with “Men Who Are Strong.”

So let’s break down what I published more specifically, starting with anthologies. My most recent one actually was “No One Remembers Him,” which was published in If I Die Before I Wake Vol. 10: Tales of Cryptid Chaos through Sinister Smile Press and Crystal Lake Publishing. This is actually my first time appearing in hardcover! Though paperback is also available for this one.

I also published a superhero fantasy story called “Illegals” in the anthology Where Legends Walk for Oddity Prodigies, easily one of my favorite publishers to work with yet, honestly. Though it’s a close call with Speculation Publications, who accepted my fantasy story “Don’t Wake Up Too Fast” in their anthology Aurora: Tales of Winter Dreams. I especially like how they have bookshop.org as an option to purchase the paperback.

The 4 stories I have coming in 2026 are all for anthologies, so I’ll be hyping those up more in the future. I believe the last one will be out sometime in the fall.

I published 1 story in a literary journal, and that was the aforementioned “Men Who Are Strong” for IHRAM Press, who also I adore working with. The story appeared in The Evolving Gaze, their spring release, and it’s genuinely my favorite overall collection of stories that I got to be a part of this year, in the sense that I devoured it cover to cover in one sitting. The artwork in particular is phenomenal.

For literary magazines, I published more in the latter part of the year, mainly because I started submitting to new outlets and drifted away a bit from anthology submissions. The most recent is “Spare Time” for The Vanity Papers Oxford Literary Review, Vol 9: Translation. The issue came out yesterday, actually, on January 4, but the editors graciously published my story as a “preview” of the issue on 12/31, so I suppose it counts for 2025, right?

Also in December, I published “The Morning Star” with Spillwords Press as part of their 12 Days of Christmas series, and they actually nominated it as one of their “stories of the month” (the artwork at the beginning is also specifically for that story!) And one more for December: “You Can Stay If You Want” was published by Discretionary Love, and I’m incredibly grateful considering so much of the positive response I received for it.

And lastly, there’s the first one of the year. I published “Upon a Dream” for The Fairy Tale Magazine in the spring, specifically for their Sleeping Beauty issue. I can still remember the euphoria I felt when reading the acceptance email, as that was the first one I got in 2025. And what a way to kick things off, too!

I’ll finish off with what ended up being our most popular short story on Cetera Magazine. And that is, interestingly enough, my story “That’s Your Problem to Solve.” I wouldn’t say that it’s the last story I would’ve expected to be our most “read,” but it’s still quite a surprise. And a nice one, too, because I’m quite proud of it as a contemporary comedy taking aim at mental health guru stuff, and that it has so much fun with its central “couple” despite them being purely platonic.

Anyway, that’s my snapshot of 2025. Going into 2026, I’m not sure if I’ll be submitting quite as much. Maybe I will? Hard to say. Now that Cetera is a bit more legitimate and getting bigger, we’re receiving tons of great submissions. Which on the one hand means I’ll have more time to publish stories for other outlets and let new writers be featured in Cetera. But on the other hand, helping Natalia edit and produce these stories is still going to be a huge effort, so who really knows? I do want to publish a lot more poetry, and I’m quite excited about putting some curated collections together that include me and other writers.

And then there’s my artwork, and I think I’m finally honing in on a style that feels “me.” To the point where I actually want to submit my illustrations to other places, especially now that I can churn these out way faster than I could even a few months ago.

Thanks so much for reading through all this, it’s kind of surreal. I’m so glad that I started to transition to other forms of creative publishing beyond just novels, which I still love to do of course…but there’s such a big artistic world out there with so many branches of expression that don’t have to be defined by the traditional metrics of “success.” You can really find so much fulfillment in this space by climbing, I don’t know, a different tree? Maybe in 2026, I’ll also find time to work on my metaphors.

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