Typing this up from a capsule hotel in Tokyo’s salaryman district, Shimbashi. Not something I possibly could have anticipated a year ago, but life can be wild like that, eh.
This was one strange, eventful year – more so than usual. The biggest disappointment was having had to cut short my Continental Divide Trail thru-hike which I’d started in April. Partly because my legs weren’t entirely up to it, partly because it was so soul-crushingly lonely (walking four days without meeting anybody else was considered normal), partly because it involved long stretches of walking on the highway… It did not meet my definition of a nature trail.
An odd experience, that: anticipation, a long journey, a glorious and multifaceted failure… An unusual set of sensations. Might use that in my fiction someday.
The other big thing was the end of the relationship that lasted almost three years – my personal best. I tried. The stress of her daily life only kept rising. The first year was wonderful. It was for the best.
That was also my last tie to Quebec City, which is how, after about four years, I finally packed up and moved to Montreal. In a matter of speaking, that is. All my things are in a storage unit, my address is a PO box, and I’m technically homeless as I roam the world, trying to catch up on all the adventures I’d put on the back burner. (See my “Feral Artist Nomad” posts for more on that.)
Perhaps because of my failure to hike the CDT, my creativity went wild to overcompensate, to make this year meaningful in any way whatsoever. Wrote dozens of new stories. Sold quite a few of them. Of the ones that got published, my absolute favourite was “Hard as a Mirror of Cast Bronze.” It was inspired by someone I once knew and loved, written during the stretch of 40 days and 40 nights when I cared for her: a difficult though rewarding experience, and I believe the story shows that.
This was also the year I got agented! Finding a literary agent was by far the hardest thing I’ve done in my entire life – and it involved writing a whole new novel, as one does. Brandy Vallance of BBLA is excellent, and my dystopian YA sci-fi novel, “The Patron Saint of Unforgivable Mistakes,” is currently on sub, pending with a few editors. It may have been inspired by my Siberian childhood…
My filmmaking side keeps competing with the writing side: my second-ever film festival was Dam Short Film Festival in February, near Vegas, and it was the single greatest week of my adult life. The entire Boulder City came together to organize an event where every visiting filmmaker was treated like royalty, and it was cool beyond all words. I’m currently awaiting their decision for the upcoming festival in seven weeks: I should know within 48 hours. I hope they liked my new sci-fi offerings.
I made four more short films in 2025 and sent them off far and wide… That got me into three consecutive film festivals in the US in October (yay free hotels!) and might result in some more adventures in the coming months… Unless I repeat my Pacific Crest Trail thruhike, which is a very real possibility, seeing as I already don’t pay rent and have all my stuff packed up. (Strategy, eh?) We’ll see.
One definite success was getting my first-ever creative award: my film “How to Prepare for Time Travelers in the Workplace” got the second place in the comedy sci-fi category at the Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival, and that little prize alone can open up a lot of new doors for me… Incidentally, funny sci-fi is a remarkably underutilized subgenre. Hmm.
One of this year’s odder adventures began with too much beer. I was browsing FilmFreeway and applying to all the $5 festivals I could find (always an odd mix, those cheapest festivals) when I stumbled on the first-ever Worldcon sci-fi film festival. That annual convention is typically all about books, not movies, so of course I applied. And got accepted! And decided that if I attend, I may as well go for the entire week, not just one day. Seattle is always a fun town to visit, and that week was beautiful… But during the closing ceremony, the two hosts were so woefully unprepared that they didn’t merely mangle all the foreign names – they giggled while doing so.
Five days had passed with zero condemnation from any VIPs from the SFF community, and so I took it upon myself… As they say in Russia, “If not me, then who?” (“Yesli ne ya, to kto?”) And thus was born “When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident” – the single most impactful thing I’ve ever written. It went viral. The organizers of the 2026 Worldcon in Los Angeles – a different crew – have vowed to do better. (Hard to do worse.) Some interesting conversations and debates took place…
And all of that was because once upon a time, I had too much beer, too much time (but that’s nothing new), and applied for an odd little film festival. A five-dollar bill, a click, and then a long and improbable series of events. Life can be funny like that.
I may be missing some other big 2025 developments, but I believe I’ve covered most of them. As the year ends, I’m sitting on nine sold but not-yet-published short stories and an almost-finished new novel and a few pending grant/residency proposals, and more than a few dreams. Once I finish typing this and crawl out of my oh-so-comfy capsule (it is currently 11:36am), I’ll slither over to the nearby cyber-cafe and use their computers to open a government PDF and submit a cyberpunk-ish short story for a writing contest organized by the Canadian military. My life is very strange: I have tried the traditional path; I have found it lacking.
I may go back to school and get my second Bachelor’s degree – in Physics this time. (The only anglophone universities in Quebec are in Montreal.) I may try some other fun stuff and see where that takes me. The horizon is open and vast.
And just for archival and historical purposes… Briefly: this was the year Donald Trump got inaugurated for the second time. Elon Musk gave not one but two Nazi salutes at the inauguration. It all went downhill from there, with ICE rounding up random people and sending them off to foreign concentration camps, with masked vigilantes harassing Americans without any fear of consequences, with massive protests that are nonetheless ignored by 97% of population. The AI bubble looks like it’s about to pop at long last. The US military has just destroyed its 30th fishing boat near Venezuela, as per the alcoholic Defense Secretary’s illegal orders.
…you can see how one would bury one’s head in fiction, eh?
So here is to a new year. Perhaps not a better one, but a new one nevertheless. Stay safe, my friends.
Grigory Lukin.com 