Hello all you fuzzy, scaly, and/or slimy folks out there! 2025 is (finally) officially over and it's time to ring in the new year. You know what that means! Time for Lightest to do her big-ass rambling year wrap-up journal!

As is traditional though, I'll start with a quick blurb-y summary of how December went. This year we didn't get any overtime at work, which isn't surprising since demand has been significantly lower this year than the same time last year. That does kinda make me a little bit nervous again about the possibility of potential layoffs at the plant... but at least they didn't give us a fuckton of extra free days off either like that one time. So while demand was low enough not to justify any overtime, it at least wasn't so low that the plant felt the need to just shut down entirely all week for christmas and new years weeks. I maintain cautious optimism that this means the economy slowing down may not fuck me over just yet. *nervous laughter*

I did still get all the holiday time off I was counting on though, and thankfully no big crises or life events struck this month. I was able to just put my nose down on the grindstone and edit like crazy on all my days off, minus the days I took for MFF. Speaking of MFF, I had an incredibly fun time there! I got to meet and hang out with so many amazing folk like Scarlettv, Nimbus Kaden, Aleu Moonshadow, Furian, Jalen Kintsugi, shinfox, and plenty of others, in no particular order. I got to cheer on Scarlett at the charity poker tournament, see Zootopia 2 in theaters with her and her mutuals, and eat a fucking AMAZING dinner at Gibsons with everyone. I think I ended up so happy and socially active during that dinner that I felt the most socially alive and open I've been in literal years. I also got VERY LUCKY and dodged the con crud somehow despite roomie catching it.

And after MFF I just LOCKED THE FUCK IN and edited like a madwoman. Let's break that down!

DECEMBER 2025 WRITING SUMMARY

Well, thanks to spending literally every spare day I had off work outside of the con working on my editing queue, I did it! I cleared every single fuckin' editing goal on my objectives list!

-PRIMARY OBJECTIVES-
-Editing of Kimíl's New Look: FINISHED! 13,989 words to edit
-Editing of Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 6: FINISHED! Edited 34,612 total words, deleting 103 words in the process ✔️
-Editing of Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 7: FINISHED! Edited 35,408 total words, adding 1,291 new words in the process ✔️
-Editing of Tellurium Chains - Chunk 2: FINISHED! Edited 24,667 total words, adding 280 new words in the process ✔️
-Editing of Tellurium Chains - Chunk 3: FINISHED! Edited 36,443 total words, adding 617 new words in the process ✔️
-Editing of Mutagen Origins - Chunk 5: FINISHED! Edited 15,368 total words, adding 302 new words in the process ✔️
-Editing of Arina is All - Chunk 12: FINISHED! Edited 27,448 total words, adding 553 new words in the process ✔️
-Editing of Blightwrath - Chunk 1: FINISHED! Edited 16,063 total words, adding 84 new words in the process ✔️
-Editing of The River in the Valley - Chunk 3: FINISHED! Edited 18,059 total words, adding 150 new words in the process ✔️

✔️ -TOTAL WORDS WRITTEN IN DECEMBER 2025: 3,327 words
✔️ -TOTAL WORDS EDITED IN DECEMBER 2025: 222,210 words!!! 🥳🎉🎊

Holy crap guys! That's definitely a new best for me in terms of editing! Time to bust out my New Record header!

(Smash Bros Announcer Voice) A NEW RECORD!!!
Most Monthly Editing by Wordcount: 222,210 words (December 2025)

So yeah, holy fuck. My previous record was 122,040 words in July 2023 and I had thought that record was gonna be hard to dethrone. Well I get the feeling this new record is gonna stand for a very very long time for me. I basically needed every single waking hour of every single day off I got for the month to do this, minus the con days, and that's more than I ever get on non-holiday months. It was fucking exhausting since it kept me from sitting back and relaxing basically at all for the majority of the month. Frankly I am DEAD TIRED as I write this update journal and really desperately need a day or two where I do nothing but play video games. I'm kinda afraid I've set myself up for another January burnout cycle.

BUT, I still wanna celebrate my progress this month! I deleted my secondary objectives in this wrapup since I knew from the beginning I wasn't gonna end up touching them anyway with this much fucking editing to do, so I think this marks my second ever 100% completion month! (Unless I'm forgetting one)

That's fucking awesome!

I also still am riding high off of officially clearing my main and stretch goals for the year last month too. Getting all this editing done is just the icing on the success cake. Pretty insane that despite all the shit going wrong this year and my many failed months, I still managed to pull it together and pull a victory from the jaws of defeat in the second half of the year. Let's break the year's successes and failures down shall we?

2025 IN REVIEW

Just like always, let's begin with the main list of my overall goals for the year:

[ PRIMARY GOALS ]

-Initial-
-Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 5 ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 6 ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 7 ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Arina is All - Chunk 12 ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Arina is All - Chunk 13 ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-Arina is All - Chunk 14 ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-Mutagen Origins - Chunk 4 ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Mutagen Origins - Chunk 5 ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Mutagen Origins - Chunk 6 ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-The Arinafication of House Inagaki - Chunk 1 (Commission for Hyo) ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Homura is Where the Heart Is (Commission for Precious) ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Unnamed Comm story for DredfulArtist ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌

-Added During the Year-
-The Arinafication of House Inagaki - Chunk 2 (Commission for Hyo) ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Hair of the Dog Part 2 (Commission for Zaina) ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Kimíl's New Look (Commission for Kimíl) ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️

PRIMARY GOALS REACHED: 11 out of 15!!!! (73.3% Completion!)

[ SECONDARY GOALS ]

-Initial-
-Tellurium Chains - Chunk 1✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Tellurium Chains - Chunk 2✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️

-Added During the Year-
-Tellurium Chains - Chunk 3 ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-The River in the Valley - Chunk 1 ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-The River in the Valley - Chunk 2 ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-The River in the Valley - Chunk 3 ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Blightwrath - Chunk 1 ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Unnamed Comm story for Lateinshowing ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-The Other Path Chunk 1 ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌

SECONDARY GOALS REACHED: 7 out of 9! (77.7% Completion!)

TOTAL GOALS REACHED: 18 out of 24!!! Completion rate of 75%!!! 🥳🎉🎊

Fuckin WOW guys! This is amazing progress! By comparison, last year I had 14 primary objectives and 6 secondaries. This year both of these figures grew, and I still got better completion rates regardless! Last year's overall completion rate was 65%, which is already really good for me, and I beat it by 10% this year! That's fucking fantastic measurable year-on-year improvement of my output and dependability as a writer! It's still not as high as I'd like, I'd prefer 80%+, but growth is growth! I'll honestly be really lucky to maintain this level of growth in the future!

Let's see the month-by-month breakdown summary shall we?

[ JANUARY ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 7,248 words
TOTAL: 7,248 words

[ FEBRUARY ]
-The Arinafication of House Inagaki: 38,415 words
-The Other Path: 2,900 words
-Tellurium Chains: 3,137 words
-Hair of the Dog: 3,137 words
TOTAL: 44,549 words

[ MARCH ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 629 words
-The Other Path: 1,588 words
TOTAL: 2,217 words

[ APRIL ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 15,295 words
-The Other Path: 725 words
-Tellurium Chains: 8,145 words
-Granddaughters of Din: 9,288 words
-The River in the Valley: 8,701 words
-The Arinafication of House Inagaki: 638 words
TOTAL: 42,792 words

[ MAY ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 1,699 words
-Tellurium Chains: 6,366 words
-The River in the Valley: 8,696 words
-Granddaughters of Din: 1,198 words
TOTAL: 17,959 words

[ JUNE ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 11,333 words
-Tellurium Chains: 1,648 words
-The River in the Valley: 1,286 words
TOTAL: 14,267 words

[ JULY ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 10,512 words
-Tellurium Chains: 15,893 words
-The River in the Valley: 16,957 words
TOTAL: 43,362 words

[ AUGUST ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 1,090 words
-Homura is Where the Heart is: 10,013 words
-Mutagen Origins: 10,844 words
-The River in the Valley: 1,683 words
-Tellurium Chains: 762 words
-Arina is All: 19,077 words
TOTAL: 43,469 words

[ SEPTEMBER ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 3,497 words
-Homura is Where the Heart is: 22 words
-Tellurium Chains: 1,237 words
TOTAL: 4,756 words

[ OCTOBER ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 9,768 words
-Tellurium Chains: 40,670 words
TOTAL: 50,438 words

[ NOVEMBER ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 17,613 words
-Kimíl's New Look: 13,989 words
-Blightwrath: 15,979 words
-Mutagen Origins: 15,112 words
-The River in the Valley: 16,647 words
-Arina is All: 43 words
TOTAL 79,383 words

[ DECEMBER ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 1,188 words
-Kimíl's New Look: 153 words
-Tellurium Chains: 897 words
-Arina is All: 553 words
-The River in the Valley: 150 words
-Mutagen Origins: 302 words
-Blightwrath: 84 words
TOTAL 3,327 words

FINAL YEARLY WORDCOUNT TOTAL: 🎉🥳 353,767 WORDS! 🎉🥳

Fucking awesome! Though this is the first year that I have caught an actual math error in a past month's calculations as I worked on this breakdown and had to finish it. During my August Writing Journal of this year I had incorrectly tallied my words and come to a total of 43,048 words, when in fact the real total was 43,469. I have not gone back to edit that journal and fix it, but I have at least made this journal's above breakdown use the actual correct number for that month.

As for comparing yearly progress, last year I wrote 301,062 words, which means that this year I wrote 52,705 more words than last year! A VERY fucking solid year-over-year improvement!

This year I beat my main goal by 20,434 words, and last year I had beaten my regular goal by only 1,062 words. That means, in a practical sense, I only BARELY skimmed by my main goal and this year I blew it out of the water! In terms of stretch goals, last year I actually failed to meet my stretch goal by 31,938 words, and this year I just barely skimmed by my stretch goal by 3,767 words. That is HUGE improvement on my stretch goal progression year over year!

This tells me that overall, my main goal was actually a serious under-estimation of my new capabilities, while my stretch goal was basically right at what I could handle. I actually underestimated myself a fair bit this year, expecting the political events of 2025 to fucking ruin my muse. I guess my muse decided to be like "Nah mate, fuck that, let's write EVEN MORE as a form of escapism."

You'll also notice that I did a fair bit of work on Granddaughters of Din earlier in the year, but didn't actually count it in either of my Primary or Secondary Objectives lists for the year. That's really just because I never once planned to actually work on it this year, and when I did work on it, it was with the understanding that it was temporary and I wouldn't be coming back to it.

Surely though the same thing could be said about The Other Path, right? Yeah well... I did choose to work on it in a similarly spur-of-the-moment way, but I at least had a goal in mind for it, that I fully transcribe everything I had written for it from my paper notebook into digital. And since I actually did fail to do this, it's fair to add it to my objectives as a missed goal.

Granted, hitting all these goals was VERY EXHAUSTING this year. Basically the entire 4th quarter of the year was a dead fucking sprint of writing and then editing in order to cancel out my failed months. I think, when setting my next set of goals for 2026, I am going to be a bit less over-ambitious. I can tell that every new monthly quota I set each year has gotten harder and harder to hit, missing these quotas feels more demoralizing, and every missed quota month sets me back on my year-on goals A LOT MORE. But before we actually set those goals, let's do the next breakdown, the per-series breakdown!

PER-SERIES BREAKDOWN:
- Crossing of the Paths: 79,872
- Tellurium Chains: 78,775
- The River in the Valley: 54,120
- The Arinafication of House Inagaki: 39,053
- Mutagen Origins: 26,258
- Arina is All: 19,673
- Blightwrath: 16,063
- Kimíl's New Look: 14,142
- Granddaughters of Din: 10,486
- Homura is Where the Heart is: 10,035
- The Other Path: 5,213
- Hair of the Dog: 3,137

Phew! Tallying all this is a huge pain, but I loooove the results. That nice, neatly organized set of data is so damn pleasing to look at.

Once again, my work is nice and spread out across a ton of projects, with COTP only taking up 22% of my output for the year. This is similar to last year, proving that I have finally managed to completely beat my problem of hyperfocusing too much on COTP!

Though... adding COTP and Tellurium Chains together now accounts for 44% of my yearly output, and since both of them are personal work for me, that means I'm still letting my own personal stuff dominate my output by pure wordcount. Add in The River in the Valley and that takes it up to 60% of my work being personal. So at least, by raw wordcount, I'm still doing a fair bit more personal work than I am commission work.

*Calculates it out*

Yeah actually, by wordcount, this year only 66,367 words of my 353,767 words are commission work, or just 18.7%. Last year, commissions were about 24% of my output for the year. So this year we've seen a marked decrease in my commission output. I think this can be accounted for by considering the fact that I've had to spend a lot more time catching up on my wordcount deficits this year, despite having ROUGHLY the same amount of bad months as average. When my monthly quotas are higher and higher and higher, it sets me a lot further behind and makes me need to spend more time doing recovery sprints, and when I'm recovery sprinting it's very hard for me to focus on comms. I do my best comm work when I'm NOT behind on my goals.

Bleh, I'm gonna need to be a lot more cautious in 2026 about letting myself fall too far behind quotas. If this pattern keeps up I'm not going to exactly make progress toward being a "professional" furry writer.

That and I think my biggest other failure this year was only getting 1 chunk of Arina is All done when I had set out for three. I felt bad for neglecting Arina at the start of the year and I feel even worse about doing it again this year too. Arina seriously needs some love. Let's set up our next year's goals with that in mind again shall we?

WRITING GOALS FOR 2026

Ok everyone, let's make 2026 the year where I spread out my work even more evenly shall we? I'm gonna try to set even more reasonable and realistic goals.

[ PRIMARY GOALS ]
-Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 8
-Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 9
-Arina is All - Chunk 13
-Arina is All - Chunk 14
-Mutagen Origins - Chunk 6
-Mutagen Origins - Chunk 7
-The River in the Valley - Chunk 4
-The River in the Valley - Chunk 5
-Blightwrath - Chunk 2
-Blightwrath - Chunk 3
-Untitled Comm story for DredfulArtist
-Untitled Comm story for Lateinshowing

[ SECONDARY GOALS ]
-Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 10
-The River in the Valley - Chunk 6
-Blightwrath - Chunk 4
-Any Additional Commissions

There we go, I think this is a really nice, balanced set of goals! Only shooting for two chunks each of my main self-indulgences is a good way to ensure my focus is spread out, and I can still put additional chunks of them into my Secondaries.

I also only have 2 comms on my queue here, since I've cleared so many of them before. This might affect my 2026 stats even more and reduce my ratio of commissions to personal work even more, but there's always a chance that I might have more of my friends sign up for comms! Plus, I've ironed out a general plan for the Comm for Lateinshowing, which could potentially be like a 100K word epic about Kitsunes in a Modern Fantasy setting, if everything comes together properly! I still have to clear up a few more details about it before I can start on it, but I think it has great potential to be a real amazing long form comm story!

As for our wordcount goals?

NEW WORDCOUNT GOAL FOR 2026: 350,000 words!
OPTIONAL STRETCH GOAL FOR 2026: 365,000 words!

NEW MONTHLY QUOTA: 29,167 words!
MONTHLY STRETCH GOAL: 30,417 words!

Basically, since I hit my 350K stretch goal last year, I wanted to make it into my regular goal. Then the stretch goal is just 15K more, which should be a very modest and attainable increase. But the stretch goal is also very special to me this time around for one specific reason.

If any of y'all have been following me since the old days back when I first started tracking my writing, it started roughly in March of 2021. My very first yearly writing goal back then was to write 1,000 words a day, totaling to this number, 365,000 words. Obviously I didn't even come close of course, that goal was FAR more immense and ambitious than I had realized. I didn't even summarize my sum total progress that year either, since I was so new to self-tracking my progress and didn't have the self discipline to even keep up the journal entries regularly. Hell I don't even remember how many words I ultimately got that year, but it was probably less than 200K. But if I can actually pull it off and get 365,000 words THIS year, well, wouldn't that be a beautiful and poetic thing? It'd be coming full circle as a writer, meeting the old overambitious goal I tried to start with.

Sure it'll be hard, especially if I do have more burnout moments, or car troubles, or illnesses, or job problems, or any other numerous possible pitfalls. But I've only come this far and progressed this much as an author by refusing to give up and continuing to set higher goals for myself. Someday I may hit the ceiling of my capabilities and realize my personal limits as an author, but I'm not gonna stop until then! Let's go for it!

JANUARY 2026 WRITING GOALS

Uhhhh... so where to start? I know I should PROBABLY prioritize my two comms first. But I haven't finalized all the details of either of them with the commissioners just yet... and I CAN feel a looming threat of burnout coming from how hard I pushed myself for the entire fourth quarter of 2025. Maybe I should just rest and only work on self-indulgent stuff first, while talking with dredfulartist and lateinshowing to get some outlines and final details worked out in the background. Get some good rest and tackle the next comm when I'm fresh and at my best in February.

-PRIMARY OBJECTIVES-
-Mutagen Origins - Chunk 6: Expected 15,000 words
-The River in the Valley - Chunk 4: Expected 15,000 words

-SECONDARY OBJECTIVES-
-Editing of Mutagen Origins - Chunk 6: Expected 15,000 words
-Editing of The River in the Valley - Chunk 4: Expected 15,000 words
-Blightwrath - Chunk 2: Expected 15,000 words

Total Expected Writing Wordcount for January 2026: 30,417-45,000 words
Total Expected Editing Wordcount for January 2026: 30,417-45,000 words

Ok, this is very cushy. No wordcount deficits to catch up, no commissions to worry about for now, no mountainous editing queue. All just self-indulgence. Though I have struggled with Mutagen in the past, I'm starting to get close to a point that is gonna be VERY fun and therefore easy to write, so I suspect I'll be able to blow through it.

This year I am also going to be VERY careful about not getting too far behind on my editing. I am gonna try hard to edit as I go this time rather than letting it all pile up. Like I said earlier, I think I only let my editing get so far behind last year because I had so many bad months of writing output that set be behind on my quotas, and I needed to do desperate catch-up sprints that took all my energy and left none for editing. If I can figure out how to be more consistent and have less bad months, I should hopefully have better luck with keeping up with my editing too.

And there we have it folks, that's a wrap! Overall I would call my 2025 a stunning success, and I feel confident that 2026 will continue that trend as long as life allows it. Wish me luck!

And thanks again for all y'all who STILL stick with me regardless of all my slow writing, delays, mistakes, and failures. You guys make the writing work worth it! See you next month!