History That Never Was

So what’s 2026 looking like?

Well, I’m not entirely sure yet. I don’t think I’m completely through my burnout, though I’m making progress. My day job remains hectic. I’ve also been dealing with some health issues on account of getting older (minor in the grand scheme of things, thankfully), so even my best intentions for being productive sometimes have to take a backseat to what I can actually do.

I do have plans to release four books in 2026: a dark contemporary fantasy/horror collection in March, a novelette in May, a collection of Sure Shot short stories in July, and the fourth volume of Unfixed Timelines in September. I’m also continuing to work on my role-playing game, and though I don’t have a date planned for that yet, I do think it will come out in 2026 as well.

I’d like to try to write more drabbles this year, possibly trying to do one a week based on the Reach Your Apex prompts. I also realized recently that I have about 50 short stories in various states of draft, so I’d like to try to poke at one of those each week to see if I can finish any of them, as I’ve got very few short stories making the submissions rounds (plenty of flash fiction and shorter, as well as poems, but not a lot of short stories).

So here’s my tentative list:

• Various writing challenges throughout the year (three or more).
• Write a drabble each week.
• Poke at a short story each week.
• Increase my submission numbers.
• Review 18 books.

There are a few other things I might work on, but I feel like this is a good list. Some of it is nebulous–I don’t really think I’ll get 52 short stories out of the year, but if I can get that list of “various states of draft” shorter, that would be an accomplishment. I’d also like to increase my submission numbers, though I’m not setting an actual goal of X submissions a month, because publishing is fickle, and sometimes there aren’t enough markets or stories to hit a given target. But my 2025 numbers were around 20 pieces a month, so I’ll try to exceed that, at least. The reviews is the only thing I’m putting a number on, because that’s generally one book review every three weeks, which is a schedule that seems to work pretty well for me.

Tags: 2026, goals, planning

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Thursday, January 8th, 2026 at 6:00 am and is filed under Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.