Here in the US, the Thanksgiving Holiday is behind us, and Black Friday is gone. All the stores and television channels are now in full Christmas mode. I even received an email over the weekend urging me to buy my Valentines gift now before it’s too late!

I’ve already begun building the 2025 version of the various spreadsheets I use to track finances, investments, and writing. As I’ve done that, naturally my thoughts have turned to the coming year. I’ll leave a review of 2024 until later this month when I’ll have a better idea of how 2024 really turns out.

Some of the 2025 thoughts are very unformed at the moment – like what books to write. I can say the next Jacob and Miriam story and the next books in the Serpent Trilogy, but that’s trying to force my creative voice and as I learned in November, that doesn’t work so well.

Some of the business related goals are easier. The web site where you’re reading this blog, for example hasn’t been updated in over a year, which begs a decision. Spend the time updating the web site, or bite the bullet and move everything to Shopify? My gut feel at the moment is to move everything to Shopify because there I can also manage a mailing list.

Outside of writing, I found a neat investment charting package that looks to do most of what I want for a semi-automated trading system. More on that as I learn more about the software. And let’s not forget the honey-do list :). We’ve been in our current house for nearly seven years and there are a lot of paint jobs coming due.

One blessing is that I don’t have to search for a new contract this year. Leaving that aside, it’s still a long list, and whichever way I look at it, 2025 is shaping up to be a busy year.