So here we are, hurtling toward 2026 and running out of days to write and post annual updates and status reports. 2025 has been a strange year for me, creativity-wise. By some measures, I can reckon two creative failures and one big win.

Early in the year, I had lots of time and two exciting projects in the pipeline. The first was a dreampunk novel that played with the nature of reality. The other was a novel-in-verse retelling of a lesser-known episode from the Trojan War. I felt confident that I could get one or the other completed and out for submission by the end of the year. With a bit of a push, maybe both. But after a year of false starts and hard stops, neither project is anywhere near ready for prime time.

Those are the fails.

But then there's the More Tomorrow project. On the first day of 2025, I resolved to write a short poem each day and release it into the world. The intent was for creative expression to become a daily habit for me instead of a series of hot and cold streaks. The plan called for 365 consecutive mini-projects to be brought to successful completion.

I expected to lose interest along the way, or to suffer the inevitable bad day that would break the streak, but this morning I posted poem 362 of 365 with only four days left in the year. I'm within spitting distance from a perfect score!

That's a very big win.

Not that the uncompleted novels are actual fails, since they still provide a base that can be brought back into play at any time. And not that the poems are all that much of a win unless I can build on a year's worth of positive momentum.

As 2025 has been coming to an end, I've been thinking a lot about what comes next. Do the poems end after the 365th of them is written, or do I reup? If so, would a New Year's Day 2026 poem be Number 366 of some unknown total or a new Number 1 of 365?

What if, instead of waking up to write a poem, I woke up to write the next few pages of a novel, redirecting that streak of poetry into a streak of prose?

Over the past month, as the year drew to a close, I found myself sprucing up the website where I archive my poems. I further streamlined the process of posting them. I bought a foldable keyboard to write from my phone if my computer is unavailable. My subconscious has already decided to keep going.

For 2026, I'm going to start weening myself off of the AI images that decorated each of the poems this past year. 2025 was a year of creating at the edges of technology, and those images will be updated in a standardized style, but going forward, I plan to make my own damn backgrounds and the SlopStopper plugin will remove the AI images from your sight if you toggle the switch.

I thought about collecting the 365 poems of 2025 into a book but, looking back, I found that many of them just aren't very good. Over the course of the year, my poetry progressed from beginner to intermediate level. There are maybe a hundred poems I'm particularly proud of and an equal number that make me cringe, but that's what editing is for.

The More Tomorrow website is a live archive of interlinked poems indexed and interlinked in chronological, alphabetical, and thematic directories. Putting them into print in any kind of definitive form would ruin the experience. So instead, I'm going to add a new poem each day and make incremental changes to make the collection as a whole better and better over the course of 2026.

Thanks for staying with me on this journey and feel free to check into gfishbone.com for daily works. (Poems are written daily but sometimes it may take a couple days for me to post them.)

Have a happy New Year!

So here we are, hurtling toward 2026 and running out of days to write and post annual updates and status reports. 2025 has been a strange year for me, creativity-wise. By some measures, I can reckon two creative failures and one big win.

Early in the year, I had lots of time and two exciting projects in the pipeline. The first was a dreampunk novel that played with the nature of reality. The other was a novel-in-verse retelling of a lesser-known episode from the Trojan War. I felt confident that I could get one or the other completed and out for submission by the end of the year. With a bit of a push, maybe both. But after a year of false starts and hard stops, neither project is anywhere near ready for prime time.

Those are the fails.

But then there's the More Tomorrow project. On the first day of 2025, I resolved to write a short poem each day and release it into the world. The intent was for creative expression to become a daily habit for me instead of a series of hot and cold streaks. The plan called for 365 consecutive mini-projects to be brought to successful completion.

I expected to lose interest along the way, or to suffer the inevitable bad day that would break the streak, but this morning I posted poem 362 of 365 with only four days left in the year. I'm within spitting distance from a perfect score!

That's a very big win.

Not that the uncompleted novels are actual fails, since they still provide a base that can be brought back into play at any time. And not that the poems are all that much of a win unless I can build on a year's worth of positive momentum.

As 2025 has been coming to an end, I've been thinking a lot about what comes next. Do the poems end after the 365th of them is written, or do I reup? If so, would a New Year's Day 2026 poem be Number 366 of some unknown total or a new Number 1 of 365?

What if, instead of waking up to write a poem, I woke up to write the next few pages of a novel, redirecting that streak of poetry into a streak of prose?

Over the past month, as the year drew to a close, I found myself sprucing up the website where I archive my poems. I further streamlined the process of posting them. I bought a foldable keyboard to write from my phone if my computer is unavailable. My subconscious has already decided to keep going.

For 2026, I'm going to start weening myself off of the AI images that decorated each of the poems this past year. 2025 was a year of creating at the edges of technology, and those images will be updated in a standardized style, but going forward, I plan to make my own damn backgrounds and the SlopStopper plugin will remove the AI images from your sight if you toggle the switch.

I thought about collecting the 365 poems of 2025 into a book but, looking back, I found that many of them just aren't very good. Over the course of the year, my poetry progressed from beginner to intermediate level. There are maybe a hundred poems I'm particularly proud of and an equal number that make me cringe, but that's what editing is for.

The More Tomorrow website is a live archive of interlinked poems indexed and interlinked in chronological, alphabetical, and thematic directories. Putting them into print in any kind of definitive form would ruin the experience. So instead, I'm going to add a new poem each day and make incremental changes to make the collection as a whole better and better over the course of 2026.

Thanks for staying with me on this journey and feel free to check into gfishbone.com for daily works. (Poems are written daily but sometimes it may take a couple days for me to post them.)

Have a happy New Year!