Happy New Year

Nó:ya and hello everyone! Welcome to 2025!

It’s almost midwinters as I sit down to write this first blog of the year, and I’m feeling all the feelings. Grateful. Reflective. Excited. Nervous. Ready to be over this little cold I have :). For those of you who have followed my writing journey over the years, thank you for being here. And if you’re new to this space, welcome—I hope you’ll enjoy the stories, reflections, and creative process that I share here.

2024 was an incredibly busy and rewarding year for my work life, art life, and language studies. If you’ve at all kept up with my Instagram stories the last couple of years, you might have noticed my incessant posting of motivational quotes and prompts about going for your goals and building your life with intention the past three years. Silly though it may be, these quotes helped me stay focussed on making the kinds of changes that would make an already good life that much better, one with more room for creativity, storytelling, and language (I’ve been wanting to learn my language - Kanien’kéha or Mohawk - for many years now). Happily, these transitions have happened, and while I still have so much further to go with my language learning, I’m in the program I wanted to be in and I’m grateful I can communicate considerably more than I could previously.

A movie poster for one of our micro-shorts.

I also spent time in 2024 on a few new paths of creative expression, and managed to make two micro-shorts that we got to share at the Haudenosaunee Micro Short Film Festival in Niagara Falls, New York. There were so many great short films by Haudenosaunee filmmakers and for me personally, it was just incredibly satisfying to make these and take part in something as cool as the festival. I’d definitely like to make more and learn more about making films, period. Lighting, scripts, editing tools, the cameras I use. It’s all interesting and I can’t wait to start. But to help with learning all that, I started making short art and writing videos, some of which I’ll share on a new YouTube channel. So far the videos are short but have been fun to make, and you can check them out here if you’d like: My YouTube.

I don’t yet know all the topics I’ll cover on my YouTube channel. My family is small but busy, and it will be another five months or so before our schedule eases. And while I still have to focus and make the most of the time I have left in my language program, I also know I need to use my time on this earth to be creating and writing, so my videos will likely be focussed on that. What I know for certain is that throughout the year ahead, I hope to use my words and visual art in a good, truthful, uplifting, and courageous way. Writing and making art can feel like a small contribution at times, but it remains the thing that fills me up the most, and I hope that being true to that calling will generate bits of peace I can share out into the world.

And with that said, here’s a bit of where I’m headed, writing wise. I have no fewer than three novels to edit, two more in the planning stages, a poetry collection to finalize, a few adaptations I want to explore, and a graphic novel project that I fell completely in love with last summer to work on more. That’s definitely a lot of projects, and so I think doing a monthly blog and perhaps writing a short story will help me edit, rebuild my writing habit, and keep me accountable. Maybe I’ll also try make something similar to the Brandon Sanderson’s book progress tracker, too.

In addition to this, I do have a few other goals for 2025. I’m aiming to spend 1,000 hours outside, I’m hoping to read 25 (or more) fictional books, I plan to blog and write a newsletter at least once a month, and do at least one YouTube video a month sharing bits about my writing process, updates on projects, and perhaps a few snippets from the research I’m doing for future books. I’ll also share some of the illustration and language learning things that are happening, as much as possible.

I think this sounds like a reasonable goal ***types and chuckles maniacally at future me attempting to do these on top of the teaching and other work I have to do*** and, I will go forth and do my best.

In closing, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to visit my small corner of the internet. I look forward to chatting/sharing with you all through this blog throughout 2025. There are certainly other things that I wish for this year, things I hope for the greater world. More empathy, much less war. An honouring of treaties and calls for peace. Climate action. Family, community, and individual health and wellbeing. Continued Ogwehoweh language resurgence. There are almost too many things to name. But the goals I’ve shared here are some of the things I know I can do and make efforts toward. And whether it’s writing, reading, studying, or finding happiness in the every-day, I hope this year brings us bits of joy and many moments of peace.

Happy New Year!

Sara