In the Holliday shuffle, I forgot to make the December blog post about my 2026 goals! Since it was the end of the year and I was getting excited looking at year-end recaps, I was eager to do my own. I only realized my mistake around the time I was ready to post my January article. Scrolling past last year’s entertainment, I saw the 2024 goals post, and then I realized my mistake. I didn’t want to go back to the drawing-board, so I simply postponed this article until now.

So how did I do with my goals last year? Let's take a look…

Finish and launch Walk Amongst the Stars: Book 1

This was a success. It still took me longer than I expected, but I launched the book on November 17.

Get the mailing list off the ground; for real this time

Early on in 2025, I went back-and-forth wasting time thinking about this and finally just gave up on it again. A lot of writing advice paints it as the best way to directly connect with readers. But I find I don’t have the patience to set it up, and I dread coming up with content for a newsletter. So the mailing list is tabled for now.

Begin WATS book 2

I brainstormed and worked on the outline for WATS2 while the first book was with my editor. By the time my book was ready, I had finished a small chunk of the rough draft. I’m one of those slow rough drafters who produces a more finished draft, which writing teachers will tell you not to do. Last session I finished Chapter four, and it feels like I’m somewhere around 1/3 of the way finished with the first draft.

Rearrange the blog so it has some structure rather than a giant list of entries

I didn’t even think about this one until it was almost 2026. I’m working on adding store functionality to my webpage, and once I have that, I’ll work on rearranging the blog. I want to make it navigable by year, as well as adding next and previous buttons to each article.

Explore ways to monetize

I did a bad job here. When I looked into this aspect of the business, I encountered the concept of writing a serial story with a membership-first model, and I just kept coming back to that. I decided against that kind of thing for now, as I think it would just pull time away from crafting novels. I did publish my book wide, so it’s currently available in all sorts of places. But other than that, I didn’t get much past the research stage on a bunch of different topics: Amazon affiliation, AdSense, which patron subscription service I’d rather use, etc.

I owe twelve more blog posts and four more merch designs

This one is pretty easy. I might balk at this if I were going to post much more than twelve. The only downside is when I put a lot of effort into these merch designs or blog posts, it can take up more than just a day or two of work.

And finally, I set a monetary goal on a sliding scale. From a reasonable 100 bucks (because I’m a brand new, unknown author) to a completely ludicrous $10,000, because why not aim big?

I technically made $0 for 2025 because each print on demand site only pays out when you hit a certain threshold. But from the launch of my book I made a whopping $27!

Another thing on my to-do list is to get good at marketing my books. Right now I’m a novice at it. So my book has gone pretty unnoticed.

2026 Goals

I came up with more goals than I can accomplish in a year, but here they are...

Finish WATS2.

Start WATS3.

Set up Ko-Fi on your site for tips. (Subscriptions?)

Redesign my blog.

Set up book sales on my personal website.

Create an AI audiobook.

Post chunks of my AI audiobook on YouTube every week.

As always, post at least 12 blog posts and 4 merch designs.

Figure out avenues to interact with readers that I like.

Schedule projects on my planner. (I’m so bad at using planners)

Look into more POD sites for your merch designs. Cast a wider net.

Finish my next book faster than the first one. Need to get the whole process under a year so I can serve readers reasonably quick.

Look into monetizing the blog.

Add RSS to my website.

Make music playlists on my YouTube page to entertain and draw listeners to my author platform.

Make 100 / 1,000 / 10,000 bucks. (since I failed last year)

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Hey did you know I wrote a book?

Walk Amongst the Stars is like The Hunger Games and Ready Player 1 collide.

https://www.danielsevenwriting.com/books-audio

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2025 Goal Recap

I realized too late that December is when I talked about my goals in 2024 and blew right past it with an I, Gamer last month. So this month, rather than make one massive post about both topics, I decided to do the Double Elimination Tournament and then move my goal recap to the next blog post. Whoopsies!

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Books

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Andy Weir does it again with this book. I read this one like crazy, and about halfway through I put the book down and declared that this will definitely be made into a movie. And sure enough, in the summer YouTube showed me that very trailer. In Project Hail Mary a man awakens on a specialized spaceship on a mission to save Earth. Except he has no memory and needs to figure out what he’s doing as his memories slowly come back to him.

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I had seen The Stand miniseries back in the 90s at some point, so I knew what to expect to a certain extent. But when I visited a used bookstore, I saw an absolutely thrashed copy held together with book tape and thought, “I’ll buy that for a dollar!” This version adds some cut content back into the book, stuff that’s kind of crazy that they removed in the first place. In The Stand a manmade virus wipes out humankind down to a small selection of survivors. Out of the ashes comes a great evil that the survivors must make a stand against. One of the greats from Stephen King, laws yes!

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Being a Xennial, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon was a big part of my childhood. I missed out on the whole phenomenon of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s original comic run. But for a while I kept hearing about how good The Last Ronin was, and with no more detail I just assumed it was some kind of feudal Japanese tale. Once I saw someone bring it up and reference the Ninja Turtles I rushed to buy it. The story takes place in the near future, where the Foot Clan rules over a chunk of New York. A lone turtle, the last ronin, comes to put an end to a long-standing feud.

Notable runners up:
Eaters of the Dead and Duskfall.

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Video

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Detective Benoit Blanc returns in the third installment of the Knives Out series. A series known for its combination of mystery and comedy. In this one, a priest gets assigned to a small town church. He and the Monsignor don’t see eye to eye, and then the Monsignor turns up dead. Then the mystery is afoot!

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Back in 2024, I watched a lot of really killer movies and TV shows, so much that Pantheon didn’t even make my honorable mentions. I loved this series, and honestly, while I enjoyed season one, ultimately it almost serves as the trip to the top of the rollercoaster and season two is where you plunge downward.

This series is about the first humans to be digitally uploaded and explores transhumanism and the politics therein. Very cool.

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In this one, Nick Friggin Cage plays a caricature of himself. He takes a job to spend time with a superfan at his mansion. After bonding with his superfan, played by Pedro Pascal, he’s taken aside by the CIA, who tell him that his new friend is a brutal criminal kingpin and that they want Mr. Cage to do some spying for them. Very funny movie, I loved it.

Notable runners up:
Cobra Kai final season, The Rehearsal S2

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Games

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Back in 2013, THQ filed for bankruptcy and liquidated its assets. And when I read that news, it occurred to me that I’d probably never get to see a sequel to Warhammer 40K: Space Marine. Imagine my surprise when the sequel I never thought would happen thundered in via drop pod in 2024.

In this game, you resume the role of Demetrian Titus. Stripped of his name and rank, he is made part of the Deathwatch. The game kicks off when you are deployed to a planet that is experiencing a Tyranid invasion.

Very cool game. It has co-op and multiplayer, but honestly I just wish it had a little more single-player content. They did a nice blend of taking the combat from the first game and modernizing it a little. The game is light on the story, and it gets doled out to you in snippets between missions. It’s short but sweet.

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I was only tangentially aware of this one and decided I’d look into it eventually. But it showed up on my PlayStation Plus account, so I gave it a shot. Honestly, the first-person shooter gameplay was only okay, but what really did it for me was the story and nostalgia. Being able to play as RoboCop and to get another look into that retro future world they made.

The story is about a new criminal who makes himself known. RoboCop is deployed to stop him, but thanks to some resurfacing Alex Murphy memories, he hesitates in the line of duty. Angered by this, OCP assigns a psychologist to RoboCop.

They even got Peter Weller to reprise his role as RoboCop.

The gameplay comes in two forms. Large mission areas with one goal and large mission areas that act as a hub for many smaller goals. I liked the latter more and wished the game had more of that.

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This is a game that when I initially saw it, I just saw it as one of those dating sims and forgot it existed. Years later I heard someone talking about it and they paused before any spoilers and said for anyone listening that hasn’t tried it, there’s more to this game than meets the eye and that they were going to just leave it at that and urged you to go play the game. I immediately stopped the podcast and made a note to grab that one at some point.

When it popped up on my PS+ account, I finally tried it, having dodged any spoilers for years. I’ll simply say that I found it to be an unsettling mind-blower.

Notable runners up:
Satisfactory and Spiderman 2

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SNES

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or SNES for short, released in North America on August 23, 1991, and ended production in 1999. I don’t really remember being bombarded with commercials for this one. I like to think that a childhood spent getting a firehose of commercials blasted at my brain every day made me become fairly immune to commercials. But the place I remember seeing the Super Nintendo all the time was in my subscription to Nintendo Power. Back when I just had the NES, it annoyed me when the Gameboy came out because now my magazine was wasting its breath on a system that I didn’t have or really want. This became even worse when the SNES came out. Really, by today’s standards, I’m lucky the NES held on as long as it did into the next system.

I had a little experience with the SNES before getting one. I tried a little Super Mario World and played one of the many versions of Street Fighter 2 at my cousin’s house. But in 1994, I just had to have a SNES. It was probably a combination of becoming tired of replaying my NES games and getting a taste of the SNES at other people’s houses. I remember asking my parents about it, and my mom told me to just wait. I think this was mom-code for I just figured out what to get you for Christmas. But it was the beginning of summer break, and I was feeling desperate.

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So, I made the dumbest move in my history as a gamer. Some of you reading this already know what I’m talking about because you did this too. I scooped up all my Nintendo stuff and took it to a used game place. I don’t remember the name of the place. But I unloaded the console and a box full of games. Then I watched as the cashier gave me a buck for Mario/Duck Hunt, a few quarters for Top Gun and so on. I remember Kirby’s Adventure was the newest thing I had, so I actually got multiple dollars for that one!

It was many years before I regretted that decision. But about a decade later I lamented that I couldn’t go back and replay my gold cartridge Zelda 1 and 2, Super Mario Bros 2 and 3, Kirby’s Adventure, Rampart and some more. Looking back, I should have gone to used game places and loaded back up when I got a job. The fact that I didn’t probably meant it wasn’t that important to me.

But with the money I had saved up and the NES money combined, I could afford a SNES. I got the Super Nintendo Super Set, which came with 2 controllers and Super Mario World, and it came with a mail-in order form for Mario Allstars. This was a compilation of Mario 1-3 with updated graphics, Super Mario World and Japanese Super Mario Bros 2.

The performance upgrade of the SNES blew me away. I was used to NES games that slowed way down when too many things happened at once. Suddenly the graphics were not only better but had multiple layers in parallax. And the entire background could rotate, something that got used in a bunch of top-down games. The music, while still chiptunes, were much more robust. And the controller was a direct upgrade in every way. Rounded edges that didn’t dig into my hand, two more buttons on the front, one button on each shoulder. The only thing I wasn’t a fan of was the color scheme, gray and purple... I remember feeling envious when I saw the Super Famicom.

Speaking of music, I still listen to some of these game soundtracks while I work. For example:

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Hey did you know I wrote a book?

‍Walk Amongst the Stars is like The Hunger Games and Ready Player 1 collide, but for adults.

Pick one up and help me survive this cyberpunk dystopia.

https://www.danielsevenwriting.com/books-audio

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