Through the Rear View: 2025 – A Personal Retrospective

 

A man looking through the rearview mirror.

It has now come that time of the year when we lasso our memories to the past year and take stock of what happened in the previous 365 days.

Through the trudge in the mud, the push and pull of daily life, and the constant tagging of father time at the back of your neck, whenever the year ends, it often feels as though it has blown past like the wind. So, I believe that looking back at the year just gone is a good way of getting a perspective on something that might seem to have passed without much.

Today, I do something that I have never done on this blog before – cast my eyes backward, stare through the rear view mirror, and look back at the past year of my life.

First, this past year, I made a decision which helped me pull myself up from a hole I had been sinking into – reviving this blog. If you have read my blog, then you know that I hadn’t updated it since 2019. Let me tell you, Maina, 2024 was such a shitty year for me that I made the decision to simply go back to basics and try to anchor myself because 2024 truly drained me.

This blog right here, along with other writing projects I will get to later, was my anchor.

I started this blog as part of my project at the Technical University of Kenya. However, once I dropped out of Uni, I didn’t really have much use for it for classwork. Still, though, I kept writing on it as a way to improve my writing skills and make myself someone who could provide some value in this vast world.

But of course, I completely abandoned it since 2020, and you know what – that is a big regret of my life. Because in those years, my writing suffered, and consequently, writing jobs and projects that I could do also suffered. I went from masterfully crafting sentences to someone who wrote reports, articles, and items without a creative flair.

And I wasn’t helped by the quick acceleration of LLMs from just junky image generators to now less junky, but now more competent image and text generators.

And that advancement of generative AI did me a good one because projects started drying out in mid-2024. And I remember this part of my life clearly because it was the time when we, Kenyans, were out in full force, protesting against the Finance Bill 2024. I remember coming back from the protest sometime in June and just sitting down and realizing that, as I joined the other Kenyans in fighting against a thuggish government that threatened to rob us blind, I had also been steadily getting less and less work.

This lack of work continued until I was almost completely jobless as 2024 ended. I remember waking up each day in November-December 2024, disillusioned by my life and wondering if this was all there was to life – just drifting from one mediocre job to another.

And it was during this time that I thought, ‘Hey, didn’t I use to have a blog? I wonder what happened to it? And is she still waiting for me like a perfect fantasy?’

Yes. Yes, she was.

And that was how I began uploading again in my blog in 2025 - as a way not just to regain a part of me that was drying out in the scorching tropical sun like a carcass, but also to anchor my mental health that was quickly beginning to loosen its grip. Honestly, I was going mad at the end of 2024, and I just needed something to restore some hope to keep me going.

Now, I mentioned that I thought of reviving my blog in late 2024, but I only began uploading in the first quarter of 2025. ‘What was up with the gap, Derrick?’ I hear you ask.

Well, that then brings me to the second project that I used to get me back to life fully.

Son of No Man

As the year 2024 ended with my career in the pits and my mentality following it there, I also decided to revive a part of me that was dying – the novelist part. Listen, it had been years since I attempted to write a short story, let alone a novel. ‘Well, what’s the big deal?’ I hear you ask.

Let me ask you – what’s the one thing that you truly love doing? Close your eyes and imagine the thing that gives you the utmost joy in your life. You got it? Good. Now imagine not doing that for years. Imagine losing sight of this purpose that has been a part of your life and gives you the knots in your stomach that even your crush of five years can’t match. How would you feel about it?

So yeah, that was me and not writing. So, I also decided to hunker down and write a fucking novel. Would it be good? That honestly didn’t matter. I mean, it did, but I didn’t want to be weighed down by that. I just wanted to keep myself anchored because I was crashing out. Calm on the outside, but with a whole warzone hitting a crescendo inside.

And that was when I started writing Son of No Man. Actually, I hadn’t intended for it to be a novel. No. I was writing short stories and putting them in an anthology when I realized that these stories were…meh. Tasted like boiled cabbage. Like I had lost so much of my writing mojo after not writing for several years that my writing read like a terrible high school composition. It made sense, though - those creative muscles were cranky, and therefore, the writing itself was also bone-dry. Lifeless. Uninspired. Uninspiring.

However, as I put together these short stories, mid as they were, I did notice that the two stories I had already put together for the anthology had similar-ish themes. So I just thought, ‘Well, why not combine these two short stories and write a fucking novel, Derrick?’

And that was how I spent my December 2024, and much of 2025 – drafting the novel whose mock cover page you see up there.

(A bit of a tangent, but I also decided to revive my blog in late 2024 instead of waiting for 2025 because I followed my own advice on this little piece here on how to get new year’s resolutions started late in the previous year to build momentum. Give it a read, now will ya? Okay, thanks, and back to the article.)

And it was during the writing of Son of No Man that I opened a deluge of creative floods. 2025 has been my most creative year, ever. I don’t think I have written as many creative projects as I have written this year.

For the blog, of course, which you have read, and I want to thank you all for your continued support. I might not know each of you individually, but thank you for giving this blog the time of day. Truly.

But I have also written work that I have sent out to publications. I have gotten rejected twice now, but I took those rejections as learning lessons to keep practicing. Once again, I have to keep reminding myself that my creative writing muscle was essentially a corpse I was reanimating, so it wasn’t going to walk and talk right fresh out of the grave.

I have written constantly, daily, this year, and have seen my writing improve significantly. I don’t know if I would call myself a good writer yet, but I am much better now than I was in 2019 and even in 2024.

So far, I have three stories sent out to three different publications whose responses will be coming in 2026. Honestly, I am hopeful, but with low expectations. Still, I have never previously had the guts to send my stories to one publication, let alone three in a year. So, this is a pretty big step. Fingers crossed!

My plan for 2026, hopefully, is to continue writing and sending the best stories I write to publications. I also plan to redraft and polish Son of No Man until it is worthy of publishing and then send it to publishing houses that are in search of new writers. I believe that I have a higher chance of getting noticed when I send my work to publishers who actually solicit manuscripts.

Substack

In October, I also set up a Substack (Subscribe BTW, and yes, that's a threat hehe) in my continued desire to further connect with readers and other writers and seek out more creative writing opportunities.

To say that Substack has changed my life would be an overstatement. It hasn’t transformed my life. But it has given glimpses into how it could potentially change my life.

You remember me saying I had sent some of my stories out to three publishers? Well, I found two of them through my Substack subscriptions. And every other week, I get an inbox in my email of several writing opportunities, most of which are paid opportunities. If any of my work gets accepted and published, it would be the first time that I would be getting paid for my fiction work, and that would be transformative.

Overall, 2025 has been a year of lessons, losses, but more importantly, growth. I know the sentence is a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it's true, and many people relate to it.

I don’t know what 2026 holds. And I still exist in this perpetual state of wanting to give up and wanting to push on, but so far, the pushing on side is winning. But all I can hope is that I continue laying down my cards and playing the game. I plan to be even bolder and send out more of my work to willing publishers in my continued journey toward a writing career in the literary world. I also plan on applying for more jobs, hoping that my year-long reacquaintance with writing helps me provide value to whoever will hire me.

I hope that you, too, have the boldness, courage, and opportunity to pursue that which sets your heart on fire. And once again, I am thankful to all of you for reading my blog. I am curious, many of my readers are from Singapore and Hong Kong. I wonder, what is it about my work that you love so much? Please let me know in the comments so that I do more of that, lol.

Happy New Year 2026, and may you have a fulfilling, prosperous one!

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