How My Writing Career Evolved in 2025—and the Author Business I’m Building for 2026

I began the year thinking I knew where I was headed and ended it realizing how my writing career evolved into something I couldn’t have predicted—almost as if something beneath the surface had been quietly rearranging itself all along. The year unfolded as a threshold. It was one of those liminal spaces where the old logic stops working and new patterns begin to appear.

After a glorious and tumultuous previous year in which I fulfilled a long-held dream of buying a beautiful house, I entered 2025 with as many questions as answers about what came next. I began the year with deeply held questions about where I wanted to go with my work and my writing. As the year progressed, I excitedly began to recognize how the foundations of my work were already quietly changing the ground beneath my feet. The work seemed to be asking for a larger container—one built with deeper intention and a much longer horizon. After 18 years of running this website, teaching about writing, and publishing so many books, I could sense that certain things felt complete, but that if some things felt like they were ending, others were about to begin.

In This Post:

• How 2025 Reshaped My Writing Life—and How My Writing Career Evolved
• Discovering Better Systems for the Writing Life
• Rediscovering My Teaching Voice: The Power of Live Work With Writers
• A Milestone Year: What Turning 40 Taught Me About My Creative Path
• Deepening My Study of Story: Structure as a Spiritual Practice
• What Comes Next? Mapping the Next Decade of My Writing Career

How 2025 Reshaped My Writing Life—and How My Writing Career Evolved

I look back on 2025, and, honestly, it may have been the best year of my life. It was a madcap swirl of stress and busyness as I completed my first year as a first-time home owner. I traveled as much as I could, visiting all three of my siblings at least once. I struggled mightily with recurring anxiety patterns. And I reveled in the glory and the gratitude of the beauty and love that surrounded me. I turned 40 in November, an anniversary that lent a certain gravitas and urgency to the integrations and intentions I was building (accelerated by the fact that only a few weeks before my birthday, I walked away from a scary intersection collision that totaled three vehicles, including mine).

Particularly, I devoted time to looking back on the 18 years I have spent building a writing life and a body of work as a writer—first as a novelist and then, perhaps even more potently, as a teacher. I have been blessed to walk such an amazing road—one I never would have dreamed for myself twenty years ago. It has been the greatest honor of my life so far to create resources and write books that have helped so many writers tell their stories. Truly, I am humbled. And I am proud. I realized this year that if I never wrote another book about writing, the body of work I’ve created these past two decades feels complete. If that’s my legacy, then I am so happy and satisfied.

But in that sense of completion, there were also questions. Story teaches us there is no beginning without an ending and no ending without a beginning. So if I felt, in this moment, that what I had written was complete—then… what next?

Writing Archetypal Character Arcs (affiliate link)

And so it was a year of realigning—of stepping back, listening deeper, and making space for truth to emerge around:

• What I actually want to build as I continue through middle age with my Queen and King Arcs on my way to becoming a worthy Elder.
• What kind of work gives me life and makes me feel excited and inspired.
• How I want to serve the next generation of writers to write stories that are deep and true and life-changing.
• How my creative energy wants to grow in my own continuing pursuits of fiction.

Discovering Better Systems for Writing as a Business

After all the stress and transformation of 2024, I entered 2025 feeling more than a little burnt out. Apart from the actual buying a house bit, I had pushed myself hard with work in the first part of the previous year in order to free up the space and time for moving later on. That effort had allowed me to more or less take off the second half of 2024, but as I rounded the corner into 2025 and the return to full-time blogging, podcasting, and all the rest, I had to feel into my resistance and exhaustion.

Outlining Your Novel (Amazon affiliate link)

The future felt like a wide-open horizon now. As I entered my 40th year, I could acknowledge that I had completed so many of my intentions and dreams for myself, not least with my work and my writing. Going forward, it felt like it was time for something different. It felt (terrifyingly) like it was time to reexamine the infrastructure I had built for my author business two decades ago and acknowledge where things needed to be torn down and rebuilt. The writing world (not to mention the world world) is not the same place it was when I hopped on my little Blogger blog back in 2007 or used CreateSpace to publish first Behold the Dawn, then Outlining Your Novel.

At the beginning of the year, I looked out on the new landscape in front of me with no small amount of fear and overwhelm. Some days, it barely felt like I was keeping up with the old ways of doing things. How was I going to find time and energy to figure out the new ways? The digital world seemed to be shifting beneath my feet, and the rise of new tech—along with the transition from traditional SEO (search engine optimization) to this newer, less-understood world of GEO (generative engine optimization)—felt especially daunting. I knew I needed to adapt in order to keep my content visible, but had no idea how.

As a solopreneur, the increasingly crushing administrative load has often relentlessly forced the more creative, human parts of my work to take more and more of a backseat. Like many writers, I sometimes feel a great deal of resistance toward the pace of technological change. I had the disquieting sense that the ground rules for visibility, discoverability, and creative entrepreneurship were evolving faster than I could integrate. But I knew I wanted to understand these changes for myself and form my own opinions, rather than be swept up in either collective hysteria or blind gung-ho-ness.

So I buckled down to do the work of articulating pain points in my business, recognizing the half-formed ideas I’d been carrying for a long time, and imagining pathways into the kind of future that could feel not just manageable, but genuinely exciting. For the first time in a long while, I felt a spark of possibility about how I might integrate everything I had learned from all the trial and error of my authorpreneurship in the last two decades to build an even better 2.0 foundation going forward. Where might I go next, and how might the next decades of my work with writers evolve into even greater harmony with my deepest intentions?

Rediscovering My Teaching Voice: The Power of Live Work With Writers

Midsummer, I received an invitation from writing coach Heather Davis to speak at her WorldShift Online Summit for speculative writers. To be honest, this is the kind of request I almost always turn down. Speaking gigs and interviews—anything that requires showing up live—is always a tough fit for my energy. But the way Heather framed the opportunity felt different. The topic aligned uncannily with ideas I’d already been considering for future projects, and because the structure allowed me to pre-record my presentation and participate live only through chat, it felt like a rare chance to say yes without committing to something stressful. At the very least, I knew the class I created could be repurposed down the road. So I agreed.

I expected little more than a solid professional experience. Instead, the entire summit stunned me. Heather orchestrated one of the most seamless, thoughtful, and high-caliber events I’ve ever been a part of. She made the process effortless for the speakers, and the high quality made it a joy to promote to my audience.

Recording the presentation reminded me how much I enjoy connecting like this when I’m able to do it in a way that supports my natural rhythms. When the presentation was published, the live chat opened up an inspiring channel of connection. It was a blast to plug in to that live energy and to connect with so many thoughtful, curious, receptive writers. That response lit something up in me.

The experience ended up being pivotal. It felt like a confirmation of this shift that had been quietly building throughout the year. As I stepped into my fortieth year, WorldShift felt like a signpost pointing straight toward the kind of work I want to lean into next: deeper teaching, more intentional live experiences, and offerings that let me share the well I’ve been cultivating for the last two decades. It was, in every sense, an affirmation that the next era of my career wants to unfold in a more expansive, communal, and soul-aligned way.

(And if you missed WorldShift last year, I’ll be participating again this August! If you’re on my mailing list, you’ll get all the details.)

A Milestone Year: What Turning 40 Taught Me About My Creative Path

Turning forty carried a magnitude I couldn’t ignore. More than anything, this year taught me that the deeper dimensions of story are inseparable from the deeper dimensions of life. I’ve already written an entire birthday post about my personal experience of my forty years on this planet. Nearly twenty of those years have been spent as a professional writer, as the steward of Helping Writers Become Authors, and as someone who is continually exploring the intersection of story, creativity, and the inner life.

Looking back, I can see my four decades falling almost perfectly into symbolic arcs. What strikes me most is the deep sense that my most important work is still ahead of me. Everything I’ve done so far and everything I’m building now feels like the foundation for what I still want to teach in the decades to come.

Those early years, zero to twenty, were all about play—pure immersion in story. I had no thought of becoming a novelist, much less someone who would one day teach others about story. It was just that story has always been my language. I spent those years dreamzoning, imagining, reading, and living inside that right-brained field of wonder that is still the heart of everything I do.

Structuring Your Novel: Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition (Amazon affiliate link)

Then came years twenty to forty: the years of building. Learning how to write stories. Mastering the technicalities of plot structure and character arcs. Creating and growing a business. Sharing what I learned with the writing community.

But if my twenties were about learning craft and construction, my thirties were something entirely different. That decade took me on a profound personal quest—of which story was an integral, ineffable part. On the one hand, story became the structure for my inner journey; on the other, the journey reshaped the way I saw story theory and story structure. The two became mirrors for one another.

And now, looking ahead to the next twenty years, I want to continue consolidating everything I’ve learned—not just about story as entertainment or craft, but story as a powerful initiatory force and a map to our deeper selves and to the mysteries of the universe. This is the work I feel myself preparing for. This is the work that feels like the true calling of my life. If these past twenty years were the apprenticeship, the next twenty feel like the point where the inner and outer arcs will finally converge and I get to step into the deeper teaching I’ve been circling all along.

Deepening My Study of Story: Structure as a Deeper Practice

This year felt, in many ways, like a re-enchantment. It has been a return to the wonder at the heart of why I fell in love with stories in the first place. As I continue teaching the technical foundations of story—structure, character arcs, theme—I also feel called to go deeper into what I’ve come to think of as the cosmology of story: the idea that story isn’t just a craft, but a map.

Plot, as I understand it now, isn’t merely a sequence of beats. It’s a metaphysical principle, a pattern that echoes throughout myth, history, psychology, spirituality, consciousness studies, and the hidden architecture of the universe (even, I begin to suspect, mathematics). These patterns teach us meaning. They give us context for where we’ve been and direction for where we’re going. They help us understand ourselves.

Because of that, I’m increasingly drawn to exploring story not just as something we create, but as something that creates us. I want to teach in deeper ways—not just “how to write a story,” but how story itself can be a transformative, initiatory force in a person’s life. This is the discipline of exploring narrative patterns as mythic principles and engaging with story as a powerful force deserving of both reverence and responsibility.

At the same time, I’m equally committed to continuing the legacy of Helping Writers Become Authors by grounding this deeper exploration in the practical, foundational material I’ve spent nearly two decades refining.

Over the next years, I plan to build out two major libraries of content (probably mostly video-based):

• The first will be what I’m thinking of as the “Legacy Vault,” a master archive containing everything I’ve ever taught about how to write a story that works. My long-term vision is to develop a certification program for editors, since this is something many writers have been asking me about for years.
• The second will be a sort of “Story Mystery School,” where we can explore the deeper frameworks, the cosmological patterns, and the mythic dimensions of the narratives that so profoundly shape our lives.

Together, these two bodies of work feel like the natural convergence of everything I’ve learned so far and everything I’m being called to teach next.

What Comes Next? Mapping the Next Decade of My Writing Career

In the year ahead, you can look forward to seeing some changes in how I show up and what I offer. I’m still working through much of it myself as I feel into what these next years want to become.

• One shift will be a complete redesign of my website. I’m currently on the hunt for the right designer/developer to work with on this massive project (suggestions welcome!). With any luck, before the end of the year, you’ll see a beautiful new home for everything I’ve created over the last two decades, along with the beginnings of the deeper work I’ve hinted at in this post.
• I will be experimenting with moving the blog and podcast to a bi-weekly format for new content, which will allow me to revisit, refresh, and highlight important topics from the archives in alternating weeks.
• You can also expect new ways to learn from me, connect with me, and work with me—in formats I’ve never offered before but that feel aligned with the long-horizon vision that’s emerging. If you’re on my mailing list, you’ll be the first to hear about all of it!
• I’m also continuing to study the deeper question of why story matters to the writing life and our inner lives—not just as writers, but as readers and viewers in every corner of our lives. A couple weeks ago, I posted a survey for readers and writers exploring how people interact with stories, why certain narratives resonate, and how storytelling shapes our inner worlds. If you’d be willing to spend about fifteen minutes participating, it would be immensely helpful to me as I develop the next phase of my teaching! (And to so many of you who have already shared your voice, thank you so much!)

For me, this past year has been a rich blend of growth and integration. It feels unmistakably like the end of a chapter. It feels like one last deep breath before the page turns into a thick unwritten new volume. I’m stepping into this next decade with profound excitement, and I’m grateful to be walking it with you. May your own New Year bring stories that challenge you, arcs that stretch you, and creative work that feels deeply true. I hope you’ll join me for everything that’s coming, and I wish you a luminous start to 2026 and clarity for your own creative paths!

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! As you look back on how your own writing career evolved this year, what shifted for you? And what are you hoping to grow or deepen in the year ahead? Tell me in the comments!

Want More?

If you’re already feeling called to start going deeper with your stories, check out my Archetypal Character Guided Meditations. I designed these immersive sessions to help you sink beneath the surface of your story, tap the subconscious layers of your characters, and reconnect with the intuitive, dreamlike origins of your creativity. They’re a powerful tool for dreamzoning, thematic exploration, and accessing the deeper symbolic currents that shape your stories from the inside out. You can explore the full collection in my shop (get 1 free if you buy all 6!).

Go on the journey with your characters! Check out the Archetypal Character Guided Meditations.

Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, or Spotify).

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