2025 EOY Notes (Typed While Parenting)

Showing up counts for more than you know.

Happy New Years Eve, Substack Fam.

I’m typing this from my mom’s crib in Tampa, where I’m visiting family for the holidays. We’re getting ready to take my kids to a trampoline park to get them tired so they can nap and be ready to turn up all night with the Puerto Rican side of their bloodline. I’m mad tired because they decided to wake up at 3 a.m. last night, as toddlers are sometimes contractually obligated to do.

I had planned to write a more in-depth end-of-year post, but my kids have been off from school since December 19, we’ve been traveling, and whatever downtime I’ve had I’ve used to read through and mark-up the second draft of my novel before I send it to my agent at the beginning of the new year.

To that end, I’ve been lugging around this brolic binder everywhere. I’ve taken it to the auto shop while getting my oil changed, to family members’ houses, to fast-food chains, and pretty much anywhere I have a chance to sit still for more than ten minutes. I finally finished reading the whole thing a day ago at a strip-mall Panera in Tampa, while my wife shopped and my mom held it down babysitting the kids.

I’m excited to get back to Miami, implement these notes, and see what the fuck is up.

In that sense, 2026 is beginning in roughly the same place where 2025 began: In the pages. Excavating. Playing. Trying to make something funky and alive—something I’m proud of.

2025 was a good year. Not quite as momentous as 2024, when my debut novel finally came out after ten years of laboring on it, but good in a quieter way.

I spent more time with my family. I did a lot of work around the house. There were some promotional things for the novel—podcasts, Q&As, a few events here in Miami. The Italian translation of Victim seemed to hit, which was nice to see. And in April of this year, the paperback came out.

But more than anything, 2025 felt like a regenerative year. I don’t know why that’s the word that keeps coming to me, but it is.

I spent much of the year thinking about—and working toward—what comes next. I’m a bonafide novelist now. I have a novel out in the world that did relatively well. And now I’m writing a second one. That’s a very different feeling from writing the first book, when no one is expecting anything from you.

I’m grateful there are people out there looking forward to the next thing. But I’ve also focused on, ironically, ignoring them, and ignoring anything that feels like pressure, or that feels like the impulse to please. A lot of my creative work this year was about rediscovering play. Following my curiosity. Trusting what I’m interested in and going wherever it leads.

To that end, I got active. I completed two full drafts of the new book. The first was about 60,000 words. The second came in around 108,000. I’m proud of that output—work that only happened between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., wedged between parenting, a day job, fixing up a new house, and everything else.

I’m proud of the consistency. That’s always been the key for me—ever since I fell in love with this shit as a college sophomore. Showing up. Putting in the work. Again and again. Like a fucking mercenary.

Outside the novel, I’m proud of some other projects I got done, too. I collaborated with a screenwriter to outline, draft, and revise a full feature screenplay adaptation of Victim. We’re getting notes from reps now. It’ll need more turns, I’m sure—but we got it done.

On the essay side, I wrote some pieces I really enjoyed, many of them coming by way of Substack relationships. The highlights were a pair of travel essays I wrote for Eddie Huang’s The Places Review, which was a lot of fun.

On the reading side, I was all over the place, and deliberately so. I moved between productivity and craft non-fiction books, biographies of tech titans, speculative and literary fiction, crime and thrillers, and even more commercial work. The only goal was to read across registers to better understand how different kinds of books operate and why some of them really work. I also spent a good amount of time reading for blurbs and in-conversation events, I started a small book club with some other writer dudes in Miami, and focused on making reading a real priority again.

I’d been using one of those book trackers, but I lost track of my count sometime over the summer. All told, I’d guess I took down around fifty. On this trip to Tampa I forgot to pack a book, so I bought a paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code at Walmart the other day and will probably finish it today, just before the New Year is rung in—which somehow feels like a perfect snapshot of my reading year.

All told, it was a successful year. Another year of grinding, of building, of staying in it.

I hope you had a good year too. And if you didn’t, I hope next year is one where you make time for the thing you love—for that dream you keep putting off. Take it seriously. Give it the time it deserves. Show up and do so without expectations of what might happen. Have fun! Play around! Make some funky shit just for the hell of it. That’s my wish for you.

Happy New Year. Thank you to all the new subscribers who’ve come my way this year, and to those who have been rocking with me for a while now—I appreciate every single one of you reading, commenting, and showing love. It means more than I can say.

More, soon.

Peace,
Andrew