Through a Glass, Darkly is the fiction publication of based speculative fiction author Jean Marie Bauhaus (that’s me!), where I’m publishing my new fiction for you to read free for a limited time before it makes it into book form (paid subscribers can access all the fiction I post here all the time and read at their leisure). If you’re new here, first, HI! Second, check out the About page and the Roadmap to learn more, and go here to update your subscription preferences.
Hello, Darklings (and visitors)!
Well, we made it to the end of 2025. The rapture didn’t happen and the world didn’t explode (although there’s still one more day to go as I’m writing this, so…).
I already outlined in my last update what my hopes and ambitions are for this space in the coming year. But before we cross that threshold, I want to spend some time looking back and recapping this year.
This post may get a little personal — it’s an experiment in what may turn out to be a regular (or as regular as things get around here) blog feature in which I share a little more about my non-writing life. It’s funny, I’ve always been a blogger, having embraced the medium all the way back in 2000, when a little tool called Blogger first burst onto the scene and made it easy for people to post daily updates. Since then, I’ve been all over the bloggy map. LiveJournal, MySpace, Blogspot, Tumblr, Wordpress.com, my own hosted blog… and finally Substack. I’ve never held back on spilling my guts and oversharing on the Internet.
Until, that is, the last half-dozen years or so. Somewhere along the way, I decided I needed to reign it in. Keep it niche. Keep it professional. Just give little peeks into my real life. And honestly, I think that’s wise. Things have changed, and it just doesn’t feel safe to put too much of yourself out there for strangers to read. Also, I have a very private husband to consider.
Still, that urge has never gone away. I even created a whole ‘nother Substack publication, Missives from a 5-Acre Wood, that was supposed to chronicle the building of our homestead and also serve as my personal blog. But I ended up barely posting to it, for a few different reasons. For one, when I started it I thought it would be a matter of months, not years, before we moved onto our property and started settling in. When standing water issues brought things to a standstill for almost a year, I was just too disgusted to write about it. For another, I just didn’t feel safe writing about some of the things I had been wanting to write about, such as my neurodivergence and chronic illnesses. And for yet another, I was already struggling to keep up with TAGD and my theology and discernment Substack, Spirit, Sword and Truth. Having a blog separate and apart from all of that to maintain just felt like a heavy chain around my neck. So it has sat there for two years, mostly neglected.
But sometimes, I just want to tell y’all about stuff. And it has occurred to me that I don’t need a whole separate publication for that. I can do it right here. I can set it up as its own section, and you can update your subscription settings to turn it off if you don’t want to get those posts.
And so this is functionally the inaugural post of Missives from a Dark Wood, where I’ll likely talk about things such as our homestead project (now that it’s back in motion), what I’ve got going on outside of fiction, and maybe also what it’s like to be a neurodivergent spoonie with creative aspirations. And also share pet photos.
And with that introduction out of the way, I don’t mind telling you that 2025 has not been the best of years. It began with us both being sick, and from January through August (plus a mild cold in September) we were both sick more often than not. And it ended with the passing of my closest aunt, just a couple of weeks ago.
The sickness was something else, man. Husband and I both hadn’t been sick in years, and had made it through the pandemic years untouched. And then starting last December, almost every single sickness that went through our area managed to find its way to us and knock us out of commission.
It certainly didn’t help that we had black mold growing in our RV, which was likely compromising both of our immune systems. For a while, things were so bad that our church was scrambling to find us another place to live, but none of the solutions they offered could accommodate our animals, so we ended up staying put and doing what we could to kill the mold and remediate it. We managed to conquer it, mostly, but to completely get rid of it would entail gutting our RV and doing a complete renovation, and that’s not happening any time soon. But we’ve enjoyed three whole months now of not being sick. I don’t want to jinx it so I’ll just say I’m thankful and leave it at that.
This year also saw a major downturn in my freelance writing work, following on the heals of my two most prosperous years ever, which was a real bummer. This actually worked out, though, as I didn’t have to worry about pushing myself to meet deadlines while I was sick. We’d had a sizable safety cushion saved up to cover that sort of thing as far as paying the bills goes, but it meant we had to scale way back on spending, which threw another wrench in our homestead plans. Nevertheless, things picked back up in the last half of the year to the extent that we were able to afford to purchase a shed and order an RV port for our property.
The shed will basically function as a utility room, housing the big ‘fridge and our washer and dryer, along with tools and small appliances that we want to keep near (but not IN) the RV. And maybe eventually a full-sized shower.
As for the RV port, we’re still waiting for the company to come and build it, which should be getting scheduled any day now. Once that’s done, we’ll just need to build our water system, and then we’ll be ready to move in. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. Literally.
And as you can see from the progress we’ve made, the year hasn’t all been terrible. This was the year that I got back on the fiction writing horse after two years without any creative writing. I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to, but I’m kind of amazed that I got any done at all, all things considered, and I’m proud of what I wrote this year, beginning with Sleep, Dearie, Sleep, an experimental foray into historical gothic horror told in an epistolary format.
Over the next month or two, I’ll be working on polishing and revising Sleep, Dearie and releasing it in book form, after which the Substack version will no longer be available to free subscribers. But if you missed it, there’s still plenty of time to read it free before then.
I also polished off Sons of God and picked up the story where I’d left off when I began writing it in 2020, before that year’s events derailed everything. Deciding to turn that WIP into an ongoing serial here on TAGD, I managed to complete eight new episodes before my freelance job picked back up and I had to hit the pause button.
I’m holding off until the impending move is behind us before I dive back in, but I will be continuing this serial at some point in the spring or early summer.
I also wrote four whole short stories this year, which may be a record for me. Three of them, you can read here, if you haven’t already:
The fourth, Out of Silence, my first foray into sci-fi horror, was published in the sci-fi anthology Ripples in Space, which you can find here.
So that was pretty cool. At the beginning of this year, on something of a whim, I set a goal to get published in an anthology, and boom, there it is. I’ve read the book, and my story is in excellent company. One thing I like about sci-fi is that it isn’t so much a genre as a setting, which blends well with all sorts of genres. So be sure to check the book out. You’re sure to find stuff you like in there.
I also started two more stories that were intended for anthology submissions, but I didn’t make the deadlines, and they both remain unfinished (including the Thanksgiving folk horror I’ve been slowly working on, which I finally gave up on until after the holidays). Finishing them both is one of my writing goals for the coming year.
Considering that I wrote all of that while either sick or recovering from illness, I think I did pretty good.
Also, this year my husband officially kicked off his music label. He’s produced six banger sythwave tracks so far, and I’ve been sharing them here in a segment called Tuesday Tunes.
I’ve also been serving as his graphic designer and social media/marketing manager (I’m better at one of these things than the other). And for the track he’s currently working on, we’re experimenting with possibly adding some lyrics that I penned, and maybe even some vocals. We’ll see. I’ve been practicing, but I’m not sure I’m there yet.
Somewhere in there, I also committed a mistake that I swore I wouldn’t do and am swearing again that I won’t do this year: I let myself panic about the lack of work and fall into hustle mode. I upped my presence on LinkedIn, spent time polishing my writing portfolios and spiffing up my profiles, and even built a whole new publishing company website for promoting freelance editing and cover design services (my publishing imprint need a website anyway, so that’s okay). I brushed up my cover design skills and created a lot of pre-made ebook covers to sell. I even started revising and updating a new edition of my one non-fiction book, Self-Publishing for the Broke Author, and created yet another Substack publication around it. Basically, I was throwing everything at the wall like spaghetti and hoping something would stick.
Nothing did, and it all resulted in bupkis as far as paying work goes, but it did give me a fun new case of creative burnout, which I knew it would, which was why I told myself not to do that in the first place.
And that brings us to fall, when we finally got a break in both the illnesses and the rainy weather, while at the same time my writing client was sending me as much work as I could handle. I pushed through the burnout and we got our butts in gear, making up for lost time on property projects, long-overdue errands, music projects and me still trying to fit in creative writing while writing freelance articles like the wind.
Which all means that by Thanksgiving, we were both burned out and exhausted.
So this has been a month of slowing down and making more time for rest. I’m starting to feel like my nervous system is recovering, and I’m trying to be smarter about planning out next year so that I don’t end up burned out again halfway through. But as we move into January, I’m embracing the season and allowing myself to move at a snail’s pace. The freelancing has come, once again, to a standstill, and hopefully, it won’t take so long to ramp back up this time around. But in the meantime, I’m going to use the time to continue to rest and recover, focusing on admin and publishing tasks that don’t carry too much of a mental load, and prepping to move, and to finally start our garden.
And until I’m ready to start writing and posting new fiction again, you can look forward to the rest of Gone to the Dogs, followed by the serialization of the second book in my Spirits series, Kindred Spirits. And there will more than likely be more Missives in the mix.
I know this year has been a challenge for everyone, in one way or another. So let’s raise a proverbial (or actual, if you’ve got one) glass to ringing out 2025 as we collectively brace ourselves for whatever fresh wonders and/or horrors 2026 may bring.
Happy New Year, friends. Thanks for coming along on this ride. This publication would literally be nothing with out you.
Love and good wishes,
