2024 in retrospect, 2025 ahead

(Image is of our two cats, Freya and Skadi, looking out the front door above a "Beware of Cat" welcome mat", with Halloween "Caution-Danger" tape above their furry heads)

A bit late on retrospective, but I’m looking as much forward as backward today.

I didn’t do one of these in 2023. Things were chaotic and messy at the end of that year, and it took a lot longer for things to settle down than I had hoped or expected.

At the end of 2023, my partner and I moved back to Calgary to be closer to family. After losing my mother and everything around that, we wanted to make sure that we were available to support my siblings and father—and with some of what happened in Ontario, we needed their support in turn.

It seems to have worked out in some ways, if not as well as I’d hoped. To manage the workload for both of us, I slowed things down and we only released six new titles in 2024: Chimera’s Star, The Exodus Gambit, Wartorn Stars, Ambassador for Mars, The Old Guard and Raven’s Hope.

2024 saw me kick off a new series with House Adamant, which has been greeted warmly by fans old and new. There’ll be two more books with Lorraine in 2025, and then I will see where that series goes. I have an idea for books five and onward!

Starship’s Mage continues, with poor Roslyn getting into deeper and deeper trouble while Damien keeps the home lights on. There will be two Starship’s Mage books in 2025 as well, delving deeper into the events at the frontier with the Reezh / Reejit.

2024 also saw the ten year anniversary of the Starship’s Mage series starting and the end of our existing audiobook licensing agreements on the first five books. This fortunate coincidence struck us as a chance to do something special with the series, which became the Anniversary Editions—edited ebooks and paperbacks with new audiobook recordings.

There’s been some unexpected difficulties there, mostly caused by Audible not handling books that are no longer in circulation at all well.

We have two more Anniversary Edition books to release in 2025 (noticing a pattern of twos here? I am!).

Raven’s Hope marked the end of the Peackeepers of Sol series. While there are open threads in the setting, Hope wrapped up the Expeditionary Fleet’s arc nicely and made for a good point to leave the series. While I never say I absolutely will not return to a series, there are no plans.

I do plant to continue Teer and Kard’s adventures sometime in 2025 and I will also be releasing a brand new science fiction adventure novel (potentially the kickoff for a series, depending on how well it does, since nothing stays a standalone in my brain!).

While I work hard to be optimistic in all of my work, I have definitely seen that the presence of a real war on people’s minds has slowed the interest in military science fiction overall. I will be experimenting with more adventure-focused works, stepping away from the more directly military style I have written in the past.

We’ll see how it goes.

I’m hopeful for the new year. The last few have been non optimal for us, but we seem to finally have our feet under us.

Plus, in the immortal words of Alanis Morissette, “the only way out is through.”

Happy reading everyone. I hope your 2025 is full of calm, warmth, and highly precedented events.

-Glynn Stewart