Reflecting on 2025 as a Writer and an Artist

Hello Everyone!

It’s that time of year where I feel compelled to look back on the year and see how things went regarding my creative projects and how I’ve done. Honestly this year’s been rather in terms of just having the energy to be able to work on the things I cared for most. Part of it might be that this was the longest I had ever been unemployed and that was incredibly more draining than I thought it would be. It’s not how one would think that having all the time of day would lead to greater creative output. This whole year was rather depressing and exhausting for a number of reasons but there were some upsides as well.

This year was certainly more art focused than I had intended but that’s not necessarily a bad thing as I am an artist as well. While I feel like I could have been writing more this year, I do think that I’ve improved a lot as an artist and I do genuinely feel pretty good about my artistic ability. It’s actually inspired me to write and draw my own manga series which I’m actually very excited about. How that whole story will play out is something I’m still working out, but I’m hoping to upload it for free and eventually compile it in volumes for anyone who would like to have a physical copy (myself included).

Still, while I do feel happy about myself as an artist and a excited for a new project, I can’t deny that I haven’t done a good job with maintaining this blog, reading books this year, and writing reviews. I learned early on that one of the best ways to become a better writer is to read more books and learn from other authors. It’s something that I intended to do with this blog from the very start and something I do need to dedicate more time to doing. But I realized that, while this is very important, I have to balance it realistically with all the projects that I’m working on as well. Reading takes time that could be used for drawing or writing so figuring out a proper balance for 2026 will be very important.

Normally I would have saved this for the last post of the year, but with how exhausting and depressing this year has been, I thought ending it on a high note with my favorite characters of the year would be a far better way to end on a high note. I learned a lot about myself this year, a lot of things I’m not happy about but things I think I can fix for 2026 at least. Rather than end on a self-reflection that might feel like a downer, let’s end it celebrating storywriting and wonderful characters!

– Raphael