As clichéd as it is to say this, it truly feels like this year flew by. One moment it was February and now it is December (!!!).

Now is as good a time as any to take a moment to reflect on the year that was, what I’ve learned along the way and what I intend to do in 2026.

In a nutshell, my 2025 writing can be summarized as follows:

• Total number of stories written: 32
  • Poetry: 1 (1 haiku)
  • Micro stories (0-50 words): 4
  • Flash stories (100-1000 words): 19
  • Short stories (1100-7500 words): 5
  • Novellas (17500-40000): 3
• Number of submissions made to magazines: 38
  • Number of rejections: 24
  • Number of acceptances: 19
  • Number of pending submissions: 4
• Number of unfinished stories: 10
• Acceptance rate of submitted dribbles, flash and short stories: 55.9%

I wrote slightly more stories this year than last year. I wrote fewer short stories and more flash fiction compared to last year. I’ve also started working on longer pieces that will be novellas or novels once they’re done. I submitted roughly the same number of stories to magazines, and got almost the same number of rejection letters, but I got far more acceptances this year than last year. (My 2024 acceptance rate was 19.2%.) I would attribute the higher acceptance rate this year to submitting less often to anthologies and themed calls and focusing more on submitting stories to markets that I thought were a good fit for those particular stories.

Published short stories in 2025:

1. Mathematically Sound: Crystal Lake Publishing’s Shallow Waters Flash Fiction Contest finalist (January 2025)
2. An Underground Operation: World of Myth magazine (January 2025)
3. Krisjan se Meisies: PEN Afrikaans and Litnet’s Short Story Competition for Afrikaans 100 (January 2025)
4. The Mist’s Touch: Dark Holme Publishing’s Dark Descent magazine (March 2025). Republished by Dark Holme Publishing in the anthology titled Dark Descent: Whispers From Beyond, 2025 (June 2025)
5. Sugar and Spite: Crystal Lake Publishing’s Shallow Waters Flash Fiction Contest finalist (March 2025)
6. Elimination Round: Black Hare Press’s Dark Moments (March 2025). Republished in Year Seven flash fiction anthology by Black Hare Press (December 2025).
7. Tight Prose: Flash Phantoms (April 2025)
8. Hide-And-Seek: Dark Holme Publishing’s Dark Descent magazine (April 2025)
9. In Her Arms: Wicked Shadow Press’s flash fiction anthology entitled Flash of the Dead: Reloaded (May 2025)
10. The Person Behind The Symptoms: World of Myth magazine (June 2025)
11. Sacrificial Lamb: Spillwords (June 2025)
12. A Tempting Offer: Schlock! magazine (July 2025)
13. The Devil Walketh About: Möbius Blvd. magazine (August 2025)
14. The Meat Sweats: Crystal Lake Publishing’s Shallow Waters Flash Fiction Contest finalist (August 2025)
15. What the Frogs Took: The Mythos Minute Podcast (September 2025)
16. Currents: Black Hare Press’s Flash Frights Anthology entitled Alone (September 2025)
17. Ontkoppel + Charlie: Republished by Ns. Skrywershuis in the anthology titled AFRI-Allegaartjie (November 2025)
18. Escape: 50-Word Stories (November 2025)
19. Red in New Hamlet: Black Hare Press‘s Patreon (December 2025). Republished in Year Seven flash fiction anthology by Black Hare Press (December 2025).

Stories Available for Free:

In the beginning of 2025, I created a Books2Read account and started self-publishing some of my short stories as standalone books. They are all available for free and can be downloaded from various platforms, including Kobo, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, Tolino, and Overdrive. I’ve also created a Free Stories page on my website where you can find PDF and EPUB versions of all those short stories.

Here’s a list of all my short stories that are currently available for download via Books2Read:

• First Love Everlasting – A Techno-Horror Short Story
• A Tempting Offer – A Horror Short Story
• In Her Arms – A Flash Horror Story
• The Meat Sweats – A Flash Biotech-Horror Story
• Sugar and Spite – A Workplace Horror Flash Story
• Mathematically Sound – A Liminal Horror Flash Short Story
• Operation Sunrise – A Flash Story

All my free short stories are also available on my website.

At the end of November, I also opened accounts at Curios and Gumroad. I’ll steadily start uploading my short stories there as well.

It has become a fun (albeit sometimes obsessive) hobby of mine to track the number of downloads each month. Some takeaways from analyzing the download data:

• Most of my stories are downloaded from my own website, especially my Afrikaans stories.
• Smashwords has been the second most popular platform for my stories, followed by Overdrive and Barnes and Noble. I suspect that there might be downloads from platforms like Apple Books, that I’m not able to see, so who knows, I might be getting more downloads there than I’m aware of. I am especially surprised by the Overdrive stats—turns out my stories are mostly downloaded by incarcerated individuals in the USA on the Overdrive platform. Operation Sunrise has by far been the most popular story amongst this population group, which makes sense if you consider what the story is about…
• My most popular stories (based on 2025 download stats) are:
  • My Afrikaans stories (especially Die Bure and Charlie)
  • Operation Sunrise
  • Sugar and Spite
  • First Love Everlasting

I truly appreciate each and every person who has taken the time to read one of my stories this year!

Highlights:

This year was a pretty good year for my short stories (at least compared to last year). Some highlights:

My Afrikaans short story “Krisjan se Meisies” was shortlisted by PEN Afrikaans and Litnet for their short story competition that celebrated the 100-year existence of Afrikaans. “Krisjan se Meisies” was published on Litnet alongside superb stories alongside superb stories from an impressive list of authors, such as Francois Bloemhof, Sidney Gilroy, Jan Vermeulen, Hannes Visser, Alet Steenkamp, Gerda Taljaard, and many more. I was blown away by the reactions that “Krisjan se Meisies” received and I’m truly honored to have been shortlisted alongside such an impressive lineup of authors.

Two of my Afrikaans short stories “Ontkoppel” and “Charlie” were republished in Ns. Skrywershuis’s short story anthology titled AFRI-Allegaartjie. I’m very proud and honored to have two of my stories in this bundle and to have had the opportunity to be part of such a special project.

This year was also the first year that I participated in Crystal Lake Publishing’s Shallow Waters Flash Fiction contest. All three of the stories that I submitted were shortlisted and published on their Patreon. Once again, I was thrilled to see my story alongside stories by new and established horror authors from across the world. It was also a lot of fun to come up with story ideas for the themes and to read how other authors interpreted the themes.

I also made it into Black Hare Press’s Year Seven Anthology with two of my flash horror stories “Elimination Round” (for the reality TV themed contest in March) and “Red in New Hamlet” (which was published on their Patreon). I also managed to get my flash story “Currents” into their Alone anthology. I love participating in Black Hare Press’s competitions and being part of such an awesome author community.

I self-published an Afrikaans middle-grade short story “Die Bure” on my website. To my surprise it, to date, has been downloaded over 180 times! I even received an email from a mother whose seventh-grade daughter did an assignment and presentation on “Die Bure” for school. I was blown away by that email! I never thought that the story would get such a reaction and feel humbled by it.

One of my goals from last year was to submit stories to podcasts. I submitted stories to two podcasts and got one acceptance. The Mythos Minute Podcast accepted “What the Frogs Took.” It was quite surreal to hear my story being read aloud in such a vivid manner. I would definitely like to submit to more podcasts, when possible, in the future.

My Writing / Publication Strategy This Year:

My strategy has mostly been to write as often as I can and publish in as many different publications as possible. In other words, I don’t just want to publish in the same one or two magazines/platforms all the time. I want to get exposure to as many different publication markets as possible and challenge myself to get published in markets that I haven’t published before.

Most of the stories I published this year were flash and micro fiction (approximately 50 to 1000 words). I enjoy writing in such a short format—not only is it a challenge to come up with a full story under such strict word limits, but I get to practice writing more concisely and it’s very satisfying to finish things relatively quickly (as opposed to the longer commitment that longer short stories, novellas and novels require).

That being said…

Most of my short story submissions were in the first half of 2025. By the middle of 2025, I started to feel like it was time for me to move into longer form fiction (i.e., novellas and novels). There are stories that I would like to tell that simply won’t fit into a neat little short story. So I started to work on longer form projects. They are all still currently in progress. In between, I write a little bit of flash here and there to keep things going.

Lessons Learnt and Plans for the Future:

I keep a diary of sorts to take note of the lessons I’ve been learning along the way as I write and publish. Here are some of the main ideas from those notes:

Give stories some time to settle. Few stories are truly ready when I think they’re ready (i.e., after a first or second draft). Stories really become good (and really capture what I really wanted to say) once they’ve had time to settle (i.e., after waiting a couple of weeks or months). Maybe it’s a matter of me having slightly better writing skills by then, or maybe it is that I need to give the story time to settle in my mind and on paper, then read it again, rework it, and only then do I really get it right.

When writing the first draft, get it down as quickly as possible. Just get it out! Don’t get too bogged down with details in the first draft. Don’t let the small stuff slow you down. Get that first draft out asap!

Chasing submission call deadlines can be counterproductive. I spent a lot of time submitting to anthology and special issue calls in 2024 and early 2025. I wrote several stories as a result, but I only got a couple publications out of it. I found that it was counterproductive to write a story specifically for a call, since it would mostly be inspired by the call itself and not by what I felt or wanted to write/say at that particular moment. Stories that develop organically (i.e., I come up with the idea and just write it because I want to, at the length I feel it needs to be), tend to be better stories and ultimately have a better chance at publication, than stories that I wrote specifically for a call. Plus, as stated in the first point, stories need time to settle, and with calls you tend to only have a few weeks (if you’re lucky, months) to write the story—hence, no time for a story to mature and develop naturally.

Making the leap from shorter to longer fiction and other writing projects. As stated earlier, I’m starting to dip my toe into longer writing projects. I’m starting to feel like I need to write longer stories. Plus, after writing short stories for the past 2-and-a-bit years, I can safely say that there is virtually no money to be made from publishing short stories. It is still great to write short stories to learn and practice the craft of writing, to earn publication credits, to become more familiar with the publication industry and to network with other authors, editors and publishers. But it is not something one can make a living from. Writing novels and especially writing series is more financially rewarding. That being said it’s very hard to make a living from, writing, and any art form for that matter—I’m under no illusion there! But like the writer Devon Eriksen once said:

“When authors are amateurs, they talk a lot about story and how to write a story that satisfies people. And you stay interested in that. But pros talk about money. It is really important to be able to attach that creative urge to a technique that you are going to use to get that bag. Because otherwise you can’t afford to continue doing this and you have to go back to being a software engineer and sitting in meetings.”

Genre writing and GameLit. I started off writing mostly horror. At some point I really thought that I would primarily write horror, but I’m beginning to think that I might not want to be exclusively in the horror genre. Firstly, my own reading is pretty varied across a wide range of genres, and I feel like the stories that I would like to tell won’t always fit into the horror genre. Secondly, the horror writing world is great, but it can become a bit dark. I don’t know if I really want to live in that world 24/7. So going forward, I will certainly continue to write horror stories, but perhaps I will lean more towards other forms of speculative fiction (especially science fiction and fantasy) with horror and suspense elements.

In the last couple of months, I’ve become very interested in GameLit (specifically interactive fiction), visual novel games and story rich games. I enjoy playing video games and have always been a big fan of interactive stories (e.g., choose-your-own-adventure novels). Applying my writing skills to gaming therefore seems like the obvious next move. I’m currently working on an interactive fantasy novel that I plan to publish in 2026, which I’ll later adapt into a visual novel game. It is an exciting and challenging project that’s been keeping me up at odd hours of the night the last couple of weeks. I will likely publish my GameLit/Interactive stories under a pen name (one similar to my name), just to create some separation between the two styles of writing. I’m still thinking it over though. I’ll let you know more about it as the project gets closer to completion.

Art. I’ve always enjoyed sketching and would like to incorporate more art (either my own or work by real artists) into my projects. AI has, of course, made it much easier for non-artists to create images, videos, and animations. I’ve played around with AI and used it here and there for blog posts, but I don’t feel entirely comfortable using it outright for book covers or illustrations. Ironically, the rise of AI art has actually reinvigorated my interest in drawing and painting. Over the past couple of months, I’ve started sketching again after a long hiatus. I’m by no means a great sketch artist, but at least I’m back in the habit. I enjoy sketching characters and scenes from my stories, and I think it may even help my writing and storytelling process. Going forward, I hope to create more of my own art and collaborate with artists whose work I can feature alongside my stories.

Afrikaans! Although Afrikaans is my first language, I’ve always been more enthusiastic about reading English books. I guess that is in part because when I grew up the range of options available in Afrikaans (especially for kids and young adults) was a bit limited. Plus, I’ve always been more drawn to speculative fiction, which has traditionally always been a bit lacking in Afrikaans, which tends to favor realism. In the last decade or so, things have changed a lot, and Afrikaans literature has opened up more to speculative works, but it is still a very small segment of the Afrikaans market. I enjoy writing in Afrikaans—playing around with Afrikaans words and creating fictional words in my mother tongue hold their own unique charm. Based on my download stats it seems that there is demand for Afrikaans fiction (especially in the middle-grade/young adult section). Consequently, I plan to write more Afrikaans stories in 2026. I’m especially keen on writing more middle-grade level short stories like “Die Bure”.

The world is full of shovel sellers. There is an endless supply of people on the internet who want to sell you their course, book, or coaching/editing/beta reading/graphic design services. J. Alan Ryker explains the situation really well in this video. Of course, there are really talented mentors, graphic designers, illustrators, editors, beta readers, and teachers out there. But I would argue that those folks are few and far between. Instead, the internet (especially social media) is full of grifters and wannabes that are taking their chances. The bottom line is that you should be more discerning about whom you follow on the internet, whose advice you follow, and whose services you procure. Don’t just blindly follow every piece of advice you find on the internet; do your own research; and follow your instinct.

You can’t rely on other people to do your marketing for you. Okay, well of course, if other people help you with your marketing it won’t hurt. But as a writer, you can’t sit back and think that your only job is writing and that publishing and marketing is not for you. Nobody cares more about your book than you, and nobody can market your book as well as you, especially in today’s digital landscape. I’m gradually learning as much as I can about the publishing industry and how to market one’s book effectively. Marketing seems to be a bit of an art as much as it is a science. I’ve set up social media accounts and run a blog on my website. So far it has been slow and small, but that’s okay.

The journey is long. If you want to succeed in becoming a full-time writer you need to be hard-working, persistent, patient and passionate about telling stories. There are no shortcuts to success. I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished thus far, though a part of me wishes that I started writing sooner, but hey, what can I do about that now? The best I can do is to just plunge forward and do my best with the time I have. I’m constantly trying to improve my writing skills, and I write as much as I can.

Let’s Stay Connected

If you’ve read this far—thank you very much!

If you want to follow me on the socials, by all means, let’s be friends:

Facebook | X (Twitter) | Instagram | Goodreads | Pinterest | YouTube

I’m most active on Instagram, but I keep an eye on X and Facebook as well. Pinterest is mostly for inspiration boards and I use Youtube for publishing audio versions of my stories.

I’ve started a mailing list. It isn’t very active at the moment, but I intend to use it in the future as I publish more.

Sign up for my English mailing list here.

Sign up for my Afrikaans mailing list here.

See you in 2026!!!