If 2024 was busy, 2025 ramped the metre up and blitzed the shit out of everything.

I started January with a mile long to-do list. Nothing new for me, but I refined it as the months moved on. I started marking off the books and stories I was working on in green Sharpie highlighter. I ended up setting myself a goal of working on at least 30 items this year.

Holy shit! you might be thinking, and so did I. I went over my list thoroughly and realised around March, with the stinking heat, and multiple books to release, things needed to be refined even more.

I wanted to write all of the novels on my list and get them out of the way, so for the next couple of years I could concentrate of getting back to writing my paranormal supernatural horror YA stories under my T.K. Wrathbone pen name. 61 stories plus a 25-story series, and a 6-story series. It’s going to be a fuck-tonne of stories.

I also had a 12-story series, a 6-story series, an adult novel, and a 3-story YA trilogy under my own name on the list.

To top it off, I had another 6 novels on the list, and wanted to turn my screenplay idea into a novel, because, that’s what I do best. There were also three short stories I wanted to get to writing.

Something had to give. So, once again, T.K. Wrathbone was marked off in orange Sharpie highlighter along with the two my name series. All of those could wait.

At another point in time, I decided to move two novels to next year. 2026 is the 20^th anniversary of me writing my very first novel, The Road To Vegas, and the two novels are the prequel and sequel. I’ve wanted to get them done for the last couple of years and release them next year for the anniversary, but I didn’t release Vegas in 2006, I just wrote it. So, they were marked off in yellow Sharpie highlighter for next year, along with getting the screenplay completed. It’s a new format for me and will take time. I’ll turn it into a novel to give me the rest of the scenes it’s missing.

I started the year off doing an online children’s picture book course with the Australian Writer’s Centre on  Mondays, so I decided to keep that day for watching courses and getting a long list of them off my LinkedIn Learning dashboard. Out of the children’s course, I wrote a story about a dog, and edited my rough draft of the children’s story I’d written in 2024.

For the next six weeks, I watched courses on Monday, until the children’s course was completed and I moved the day to Wednesday so I could post to socials three days a week and have Monday for work. I worked on small things such as the Australian Horror Guide, had the covers for three e-books done (two are freebies for my newsletter, one went up for sale), started the re-write of my book on publishing, edited my memoir, got it edited, and had the cover done. Finished the update of the two non-fiction books I wanted to re-release, got the covers refreshed and they look amazing, and had the interior formatted as I couldn’t do it myself and needed someone else to. I’d created the interiors in Word Publisher, and they used the pdf from that. The company led me on a merry goose chase for months, but the books were finally released in June, straight after my memoir was released in May.

I edited my cop show trilogy for the first time in May, and also edited Her and Him from the Illicit Things series (as well as multiple times last year), sent them off to my editor, and had the covers done, then managed to write a third book for the series, Madam X, in April. I edited it through May, and sent it off to my editor in June. The covers were done, the proofs were bought, and some of the blog posts were done in June in preparation. And all of this was while I reworked and re-wrote my publishing book every month to get it done, and did the interior formatting to get a page count for my designer, but it soon became exhausting in itself. So much to add!

I finally added to, and finished off, my opinion essay, The Absolute Mind Fuck of Joe Hill on Blue Bloods. It’s a blog post and my most commented on. It seems a lot of people thought the way I did about the producers fucking up that character. And the actor who portrayed him, Will Hochman, had more insight into him than they did. After debuting on the 13^th of May 2024, it was completed on June 13^th 2025 after finally getting the DVD box set from my local library and watching all of the deleted scenes and weighs in at a hefty 21,315 words. Yikes! It’s on the blog here at Tiara King.

I made sure to work on the outlines for several other story ideas: a murder mystery novel, a Hollywood novel, Jackie Collins style of course, and a European romance.

Three books released, Unfulfilled: A Not So Sparkling Life on May 21st (my 51st birthday), and How To Be A Jewel Diva, Closet Confidential in June. Four books a-cooking, Her, Him, Madam X, and Dream It, Write It, Publish It!, plus a short story, The Perfect Plot, and the Australian Horror Guide, multiples on the go at some point in their lifespan, and it was only June! It all came to me working on 21 (including the essay) items by the end of June. Yay!

During all of this, I kept my weight loss going, although it slowed down and I plateaued several times. But, by May 1^st, the one-year anniversary of starting Semaglutide, I had lost a total of 4 stone/56 pound/25.5 kilos. I felt lighter, healthier, for what that was, because I’d also suffered from major right shoulder pain, and a pinched nerve in my right shoulder blade for the first six months of the year until I got a cortisone injection. But that only helped relieve some pain, not get rid of the actual issue.

And again, it was only June!

In July, I released one of three short stories, The Perfect Plot, a little something, something dedicated to my author inspiration and mentor, Jackie Collins. I kept Madam X, the third book in the Illicit Things trilogy, going with its cover and proofs. I had also hoped to have the publishing book finished by the end of the month, but sadly, with my need to continually add to it, it took a while longer. And then some people were of no help.

Everything kept going into August, and I edited the cop show trilogy for the second time, kept on making new blog posts as items were done and ready to promote. I also had my publishing book edited, finally, but then kept adding more and more and more.

I took the time to finish off the Illicit Things series blog posts, book sale pages, and anything else that needed to be done. I was getting ready for the release of the next four books and horror guide.

In September, I put the Illicit Things series up for pre-order and started promoting the heck out of it.

On September 19^th, the 10^th anniversary of Jackie Collins’ passing, I released Her. Since her passing, I have released all of my adult novels on that day as a nod to her and her inspiration. On October 4^th, what would have been her 88^th birthday, I released Him, and then on the 19^th of October, the final book, Madam X, was released to round off the month, and the Illicit Things series.

Also in September, I finally finished my publishing book, Dream It, Write It, Publish It!, and had the cover finished. I ordered the first proof from Amazon, had the cover tweaked while I fixed the issues on the inside, and started spring cleaning different corners of rooms, so it was a bit at a time.

Come October, I uploaded my book to Ingram for that proof and decided to tweak things a little bit more, and then remembered that I had forgot to add one important detail. I added just over 500 more words, and THEN I was done!

After uploading the tweaked interior and cover to Amazon and Ingram, Dream It, Write It, Publish It! went live for pre-orders on October 15^th.

I did the third edit of the cop show trilogy and added a couple more thousand words to book three. I had also been looking for the perfect cover images and found them. I think they’ll look really good.

I wrapped up the last weeks of October by scheduling as many blog posts as possible, posting videos to socials, and doing the videos for the publishing book.

On Halloween, I released the Australian Horror Guide via my Royal Star Publishing Etsy store, and prepared for the release of Dream It, Write It, Publish It! on November 15^th, two months past the 10^th anniversary of its first paperback release.

In November, Dream It, Write It, Publish It! went live on the 15^th, and I tried to wrap up the remaining book legals, copyright, legal deposit, library systems, etc., and tried to get back to figuring out what I’m writing next. I dealt with some serious shit that happened in my writers’ group and made the decision to leave (I’m doing a blog post about that next year), and I spring cleaned a different room of the house every Friday so it was over and done by December and I could have a long-earned holiday.

It’s now December, and I’ll try and take a breather, but that never seems to happen. The last month of the year is always about cleaning the house, getting ready for Christmas and New Year, getting around all of the holidays, and trying to get all of the leftover crap done. There’s usually a “left-to-do” list by December, everything that didn’t get done in the ten months beforehand gets done in a mad dash for the end of the year, but, hopefully, that’s now over as we’re the 1^st of the month. The cleaning should be done; I should have nothing left to do except for my yearly wardrobe clear out and paperwork audit, which means more time to create something new.

Come Jan 2^nd or 3^rd, I’ll start all over again, setting up my yearly blogging planner, my yearly writing to-do list, and everything else I need to get done next year. I’m trying to figure out a way of culling all of that paperwork into one workable model, but between a blogging list, a post to social media list, my full yearly publishing list which I cut down into monthly lists, and then sometimes I have weekly and daily, just to get shit done, it can be a lot of paperwork.

See you all next year.