Last year, the QTL team got together and established some personal goals for 2025. Now that we’re more than halfway through 2025 (holy cow!), we felt a mid-year check-in was in order! Here’s where we stand: our progress, any tweaks to our existing goals, and how we feel about it all!
Need a refresher? Here’s our original goals and accomplishments post.
Cole: Movin’ Along
My original goals were:
- Read/listen to 50+ books
- Listen to 5 Stephen King audiobooks
- Finish Josiah Bancroft’s Books of Babel series
- Read Sebastian De Castell’s Greatcoats series
- Write 20,000 words for Write Club
- Publish 5 or more author guides on The Quill To Live
- Complete 3 puzzle books
- Get paid to publish a crossword puzzle
Let’s start with my reading-based goals! The overarching goal of 50+ books is well underway. I’m at exactly 25 as of this writing, with a near-finished audiobook on deck and a hearty TBR pile staring me down for the rest of the year. Between nonfiction reads, audiobooks, and good ol’ physical tomes, I think I’ll hit this goal.
King-a-ding-ding! My aural journey through Stephen King’s pantheon is also chugging along, with 3 books behind me and two more to go. I have about 4 hours left in Under The Dome, so I’m ahead!
As for the two other goals, it’s slow going. I read Traitor’s Blade earlier this year, and I was already through the first two Books of Babel when we first set our goals. Still lots of stuff to go!
My book-adjacent goals are something of a mixed bag. I’m at more than 10,000 words for Write Club, and I’ve already finished two puzzle books. Author guides and a paid crossword puzzle are much slower going, though the latter isn’t for lack of trying. I’ll focus on these during the back half of the year!
The real tea, however, is that I feel good and am happy with my creative and leisure pursuits this year. If I’m not having fun, then why am I doing it? My mantra this year is “find joy,” and I intend to follow where it leads.
Brandee: Pleasantly Surprised
I had nothing but a gut full of fear as I revisited the goals I made in December. Half the year has passed, and I was not entirely sure how well I had stuck to my promises. Turns out, I know myself best, and set some realistic goals for my current phase of life.
Learn to DNF – I committed to dropping any book that I wasn’t enjoying by the 50% mark, and I have now done that twice this year. This was the goal I was worried about because I can be a bit of a completionist. But I’m proud of how easily I have let those less-than-ideal books go in 2025. This goal has given me back more time by letting some stories end prematurely so I can start a story I do find compelling.
Read and NOT Review: With my busy schedule the past few years, I did not have time for much reading outside of what I wanted to review for QTL. But I got back a lot of free time in 2025, so I wanted to make sure I was sprinkling in some books to read for me, and not the site. While I have read four non-review books to meet my goal, the books were not the titles I had originally listed as my priority reads. We’re only halfway through the year, so I have plenty of time to make sure I get to the books that are still sitting at the top of my TBR.
Andrew: Made The List, Checking It Twice
Alright, let’s start going through my checklist…
- Finish the Damn Vorkosigan Guide – Every year or so, Alex and I try to put out a large reading guide like the ones we have done for Malazan, The Culture, and The Witcher. We were cooking up a Vorkosigan one all this year but couldn’t quite find the time and energy to pull it all together. 2025 is the year, and you all should hold us accountable. Look for it relatively soon.
- We are making steady progress on this. I am wrapped up and ready to go, I am just waiting on Alex to finish up the last two books.
- Finally, Finish Discworld – I have been reading the 40+ Discworld books on and off for the past 10 years, and I am actually fairly close to having read the entire series. This feels like a good year to clean up this incredibly powerful series and maybe write a guide.
- Another three Discworld books down since the start of the year, only five to go!
- Give Hobb Another Shot – I read the Farseer Trilogy way back, and I thought it was good but not great. Since then, I have spoken to about a trillion people who say that the Realm of the Elderlings saga is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I think it’s time to dig deeper and give Liveship Traders a shot.
- Massive success on this front. After being somewhat underwhelmed by The Farseer Trilogy, Liveship Traders and I are getting on like a house on fire. I have a review coming soon, but I like the characters more, the plot is better paced, and I care much more about the plot. Huge upswing in my enjoyment, can’t wait to read the second book in this trilogy.
- Something New – Every year, I build up a backlog of authors I haven’t read that I want to check out, and this year is no exception. In 2025, I want to read something by all the following authors: Megan O’Keefe, Sienna Kristen, Alastair Reynolds, and Mercedes Lackey.
- Megan O’Keefe (✔️, The Blighted Stars, not overly in love and might try Velocity Weapon), Sienna Kristen (✔️, Heretics Guide to Homecoming, fabulous and everyone should read it), Alastair Reynolds (✔️, Pushing Ice, this one wasn’t for me but it only made me want to read more of his stuff), and Mercedes Lackey (TBR)
- Books to Read to My Daughter – As my daughter ages, I am getting more and more excited about what we can read together soon. This year, I am going to do some scouting and check out Howl’s Moving Castle and The Song of the Lioness to prepare to read them with her.
- I read all of the Howl’s Moving Castle and had a blast, can’t wait to read it to my daughter. I am planning to tackle The Song of the Lioness relatively soon.
- Try LitRPG. I have avoided LitRPG since I was first introduced to it because it seemed unappealing. However, as the years have passed and it has grown in popularity, I admit to an increasing curiosity about the subject. It is time to dip my toe in the water with something like Dungeon Crawler Carl.
- I cannot believe I am saying this, but I am really enjoying Dungeon Crawler Carl. I wasn’t a huge fan of book one, and would describe it as a good first effort. But I absolutely burned through books two and three, and I cannot wait to get to book four later this month. There is something about watching a protagonist assemble just absolutely bizarre Chekov’s guns that is extremely satisfying.
- Read Vagabond – Now that I have caught up on Berserk, my next major manga project will be to check out the very famous Vagabond. I am hoping I can go two for two on an incredible big manga series in the last two years.
- Full disclosure, I have not made good progress here and am now reminded to do so. I decided to actually do a reread of Trigun, one of my favorite series, now that the deluxe editions are coming out.
- Be More Insufferable About Frieren – Listen, most of you have already watched 2024’s greatest piece of fantasy visual media: the anime adaptation of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End. The manga is incredible, and the anime is immaculate. Yet, somehow, I haven’t gotten the three others on this piece to watch it yet. A new 2025 micro goal is to harass them until that happens.
- I AM VICTORIOUS. Some of the QTL team attend an anime club on Mondays. We have been alternating between classics and new entrants, and I am psyched as hell to announce that I have harassed my fellow reviewers enough that our next show is going to be Frieren. I will make one of them write a breakdown of it once we finish.
- Continue to DM for a Group of Degenerates – This year, I am taking off the nice DM gloves, and my goal is to make each of them cry at least once. I don’t care if it’s from a deep emotional encounter, a tragic backstory that opens the waterworks, or a puzzle for toddlers that has them threatening to come to my house and beat me to death. There will be tears in 2025.
- The campaign is going strong, but we are actually approaching a hiatus as I am expecting a second child in September, and there is only so much time in the day. The other QTL members have been given a deadline of 8 sessions to solve a puzzle that has been taunting them for three years. They are currently texting me answers in the middle of the night. I am having a wonderful time.
Alex: Three’s Company
Cheating on Science Fiction – So far I’ve only been able to escape my main squeeze’s grip a few times this year. With that I’ve finished the Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb (prepare for an unhinged post on that), a couple of Nghi Vo’s dazzling Singing Hills novellas, and a dash here and there of horror. Depending on how you feel about categorization, I think one could include the first 2 SunEater novels here as well with the science fantasy aspects of it. While I haven’t gone as deep into fantasy this year as I had planned on at this point, I have been reorganizing my schedule to handle some review books upfront giving my a larger runway to dig into some bigger fantasy works like Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty, Daniel Abraham’s Long Price Quartet and follow Andrew by diving into The Hands of the Emperor.
Turning Up the Heat – Well I think this one was going to be generally hard to avoid for me. I think based on the books I’ve been picking up and the books that I plan to pick up, this is going to be on my mind until the day I die. I don’t know I made this a goal – but maybe it will spur me towards finally digging into why Terminal Shock was such an insane book that did not deal with the issue. Or I’ll focus on compiling a list of fiction that I think approaches the issue with sincerity instead of relying on it as a thematic draw without really engaging with that ever growing hyperobject.
Gazing into the Apocalypse – Well, I’ve read a few books that have certainly presented futures post-apocalypse, whatever that means these days, but now I just have to write about them. I’ve started working on outlines because I really do need to buckle down on some ideas here, and make sure I present them clearly. I like firing from the hip sometimes in conversation because I know my brain does a lot of background processing as I keep thinking about this stuff, but it feels weird to pull that stunt reading books that are decades old, from a different era of literacy, and different cultures exposed to the threat of nuclear annihilation or human extinction in one form or another. So the project continues in the background, and hopefully a couple of piece will be ready to show by the time the year is out.