Is this really my first newsletter/blog thing of 2026? That hardly seems possible, but the archive doesn't lie. As bad as I've been bad at releasing news though, I still have full marks in releasing daily poems. I haven't missed a day since starting, at the start of 2025, and I'm making strides toward stretching my streak to 500 poem-days in a row.

My commitment on New Year's of 2025 was to 365 days of baseline creativity. No matter what else might happen, by the turning of the clock I'd have written something original and released it into the world—no more wasted days!

But as the year drew to a close and my original commitment approached its endpoint, I found myself unconsciously setting myself up to carry on into the next year. I made website tweaks to streamline the publishing process and to visually distinguish the 2026 series from 2025. The years have separate names (MMXXV for 2025 and Reup for 2026) and theme colors (sage for 2025 and lavender for 2026)! I planned a shift from AI art in 2025 to images of my own in 2026, requiring the development of new skills, the flexing of new creative muscles, and a double-down on my original commitment.

At some point in 2025, my daily habit became intertwined with my identity. Who am I? I am a person who wakes up and writes a poem every day. This is even what I said in the "tell us something about yourself" phase of a job interview: I am a person who wakes up and writes a poem every day; I am a person who commits to something and follows through; I am a person who gets things done even on the most difficult of days, and I scored a job offer! By Newton's First Law of Motion, when you do something every day for a year, forces of inertia make it easier to continue than to stop.

Over time, I've developed and refined the poetic voice that ties the body of my work into a unitary collection. My poems have no common subject, theme, or tone, but always the same author struggling to be clever and coherent, often before ingesting the day's first coffee.

Aside from the daily streak, multimedia presentation, and consistent voice, I've been gradually upping my game in terms of quality. Theodore Sturgeon famously said that 90% of everything is crud but, for the first few months of 2025, I was pumping out crud at the 98% level at least. From the entire 2025 collection of 370-ish poems, including both scheduled and bonus works, I probably worked my way back to somewhere close to that 10% benchmark, with 37 non-cruddy works that stand out from the rest. Trouble is, I don't know exactly which 37 they are.

Still, I like to think that anyone taking an objective look at my output would see the floor and ceiling both rising over time. The crud from 2026 so far is better than the crud from 2025.

And while the 2026 collection is well underway, the 2025 collection is complete but unfinished. There will be no poems removed and no new poems added, but sporadic revision will be ongoing and potentially non-ending.

The editing often starts on the day of issuance, with the web version of a poem being a more refined version of the rough draft that first goes out over social media. But even after the close of a poetic day, and after the end of the poetic year, the work is subject to further edits at any time without any notice. In this, I'm taking a leaf from Walt Whitman, who revised his Leaves of Grass collection constantly over a span of decades, releasing nine major issuances and updates between 1855 and 1892. He considered the work incomplete and unfinished at the time of his death.

Anyway, that should catch you up for now. There's no published collection of MMXXV coming out anytime soon, but the whole thing is up at gfishbone.com along with a new entry in the Reup series. Sometimes the poems don't hit the web on the same day they're written, but the drafts always make it to social media. Let me know what you think!