I’ve just finished Rachel Aaron’s brilliant 2k to 10k, and while I’m struck by a number of pieces of advice in the book, one lesson in particular stands out:

I do not have to write every idea I have.

In fact, I probably shouldn’t.

I’ve been stuck in a rotating world of stories, adding bit by little bit to each one, as my enthusiasm waxes and wanes. But I don’t have to be stuck in this cycle; in fact, it’s time to break it completely.

I’ve decided that my yearly theme for 2025 is going to be “The Year of Finishing.” I have too many open-ended projects, and it’s time to finish them or let them go. It’s also a year of different life cycles ending (my marriage and my 30s, to name a couple), so the theme feels extremely fitting. Part of that finishing is going to be deciding which stories and art projects get attention and which ones need to fall by the wayside. It’s going to be hard to say goodbye (for now) to some of these things, as they’ve been living in my head for years, but it’s time.

You have to get the ideas out of your head to make way for new ideas. If you don’t, you get what Ze Frank once called “brain crack”: ideas so perfect in your head that you can never execute them.

I have a lot of brain crack right now, and it sucks. I’ve managed to have a new story idea this year (which will be worked on in 2025) but everything else has been trying to execute brain crack and I’m tired. I need new, exciting ideas, some of which will become stories and art, and some of which will be confined to my commonplace book for eternity.

Maybe some of these stories will eventually see the light of day, but I’m no longer holding myself to the impossible standard of working on every idea I have. It’s the Year of Finishing, after all, not the Year of Beginning. Maybe that will be 2026’s theme…