Looking Ahead to 2026 - An Announcement and A Preview of This Year's Posts

 

Image description: Another Canva photo, edited by me to have aspec and arospec colors featured prominently, which I hope perfectly kicks off another year of aspec and arospec blogging.

To anyone reading this around the time it's first published on the blog, 2026 is now upon us! If you’re a regular reader, welcome back to the delightful chaos of my blog, and I’m sure you know what time it is – it’s time for me to give a preview of my upcoming topics for the year. I tend to plan my posts out well in advance, due to having an abundance of ideas and topics I wish to discuss, and the same is true this year. However, this year is also going to be a bit different, meaning there’s a bit of set up I need to get out of the way before the actual preview.

At the end of my 2025 wrap up, I mentioned that I wanted to shift the focus of the blog a bit and that I’d give you the details soon, hence styling this post as both a 2026 preview and an announcement of sorts. In that previous post, I alluded to some of the complicated feelings I experienced throughout the year with writing this blog, chiefly how sometimes certain posts felt very draining, leading me to feel overwhelmed, as well as the disillusionment I feel with my own abilities. I mentioned how I began to lose sight of the true purpose of this blog, and how I began to feel disappointed that I wasn’t meeting certain goals, despite the fact that perhaps these goals had grown far beyond the original scope of the blog in the first place.

In order to get back to basics and to rekindle my love of the blog, I’ve made a decision. Since the blog’s inception, I have updated every other week, with only a few brief breaks here and there due to holidays, vacations, and the like. However, for 2026 and possibly beyond, I have decided to change my update schedule to once a month. My goal is to update on the first Saturday of every month unless otherwise specified, but in the spirit of giving myself a bit more flexibility, I’m not going to hold myself to that too rigidly. If my post is done and ready to go by the first Saturday of the month, then that’s when it will appear, but if I need more time, I’ll give myself that leeway rather than stress myself out and possibly produce an inferior product.

I have to be honest, as much as I love the blog and what it stands for, it’s been very easy for me to exhaust myself while writing it, and to feel as if there is very little reward in doing so. While writing a post and expressing myself is reward in and of itself, it can be rather disheartening to spend as much time and energy as I do on my blog only to find that a given post has less than fifty hits on it. Oftentimes it’s difficult to tell if those hits are even real people or not, and Blogger as a website isn’t always very forthcoming about helping me decode these things. This means I am often left to wonder if even the scant amount of hits I get are actually spam, due to the posts otherwise having very little engagement.

Don’t get me wrong, I really have no one to blame but myself in these matters – I could promote the blog a great deal more than I do, but I am often too nervous or anxious to do so, which just leads to those feelings of disillusionment that I mentioned in my 2025 wrap up post. It’s part of what made me realize that maybe I’m forgetting the original spirit of the blog itself, which is not to meet certain post metrics, but simply to put my words out there and hope that they have an impact, even if that impact is not seen. When I started this blog, I wanted it to be a way to organize my thoughts and to help me grow in my own analysis, reflections, and opinions, all of which I have accomplished. I wanted this to be a place where other aspec people could come and feel less alone, and if even one person has done that throughout the blog’s almost six-year history, then I am perfectly satisfied.

I don’t need this blog to be outwardly perceived as successful, as long as I can perceive it inwardly, and any aspec person who stumbles across it feels the same way. And even if the posts don’t have a ton of engagement, I have seen some signs that my work is being read and is having an impact, such as times when other aspec bloggers will use my posts as part of their research or when they define certain terms. That alone means the world to me, and even if I never grow my aspec analysis beyond that, it’s enough to lift my spirits. I think now the real challenge is reminding myself that this work means a lot to me and has inherent worth – and that it would have worth even if absolutely no one was reading it. This is a struggle I have in a lot of creative facets of my life, and I know it won’t be an overnight journey, but one I have to take step by step throughout this year and beyond.

Honestly, I think I just got to the point where I was slightly burned out and to me, it showed in some of 2025’s posts. So my goal for 2026 – a New Year’s resolution, if you will, but one that I hope goes beyond that – is to fall back in love with the process again, and to see it not as a source of stress and anxiety, but as one of joy, creativity, passion, and release. It’s a labor of love, but I want to focus less on the labor part and more on the part where this blog gives me joy and catharsis. In fact, it’s my hope that giving myself less output and more time will allow me to give each post a little more attention, which will also change the blog’s style somewhat in a way I find exciting.

Usually when I write my blog posts, I do so over the span of several days, and often end up truncating the posts somewhat in order to make them readable. This is why some posts are spread out over multiple parts or why their themes get revisited constantly. But with only one post a month, I’d like to keep these posts more intact than I’ve otherwise been able to, and would like to be able to dive deeper into certain topics than I perhaps might have let myself do otherwise. That won’t be the case for every post, of course, as some topics will still be straightforward and won’t require a lot of research or deep diving, but the idea of getting to do that with some of my topics is thrilling.

To that end, I guess I should actually talk about my post ideas for this year at long last and to get back to that usual yearly disclaimer about what topics will and will not show up through the year. Naturally, today’s preview is going to contain far fewer post ideas than usual, which means there’s likely going to be fewer opportunities for me to deviate from said topics the way I have in years past. However, it’s still very possible that other subjects may present themselves to me and I may decide to talk about these topics during any given month instead; all that to say, some of the posts I mention here may not appear this year, or may change form between discussing them here today and actually writing them. But I hope that, with the ability to take my time and dive deeper, that everything I want to say this year will show up in some way, shape, or form.

This preview post will be January’s only post, which might seem like a bit of an anti-climactic start to the year, but I think it will pay off because February is my blog anniversary month and I don’t want to break tradition by skipping that in favor of this once-a-year pivot. Therefore, February – the shortest month – will have the distinction of being the only month that gets two posts. The first post, appropriate for Valentine’s Day, will be about the trope of the “fairy tale romance” and why it has both pros and cons. Then, for the blog’s anniversary will be my customary post combining aspec topics and another subject near and dear to my heart: BTS. As regular readers know, my blog anniversary and the anniversary of me becoming a BTS fan are the same day, and this year is special because BTS are back together again after their military service, and at the time of writing this special anniversary post, they will be getting ready to release an album and go on tour, so naturally I will have a lot of thoughts on what this sense of anticipation feels like and why I’m in a unique position as an aspec ARMY awaiting this highly anticipated return.

While every month of the year so far has its own assigned topic, very few of them are going to be as strongly attached to a specific month as those February topics are, and as such they may move around throughout March, April, and May. These topics will range from talking about books from my childhood to reviewing the movies from an entire animation studio to unpacking a question I often ask myself as an aromantic asexual: why do I ship characters and get invested in their fictional romances when I am not interested in romance for my own self? What do I get from it? These are three topics I’m very much looking forward to discussing this year, so even if they don’t appear in these three specific months, they will definitely appear at some point in 2026.

When we get into the summer, however, I do have some posts that are somewhat attached to the months they appear in. June, of course, is Pride Month, and I sometimes try to theme a post to that celebration. This year, I want to focus on the idea of “It gets better,” a moving and uplifting motto adopted by many queer groups to help young queer teens not lose hope as they grow in their identities, and I want to ask what that can mean for aspec people.

Here in the United States in July, meanwhile, we have a unique milestone coming this year – our 250th anniversary. While that is laughably small potatoes to many of my friends oversees (and I myself am not looking forward to the anniversary itself because I hate fireworks), as a history nerd, I feel that means it’s a perfect time for me to analyze the topic of aspecness and history. Is it okay to look for aspec historical figures? What does aspec-ness look like in those cases? It’s a big topic, but I think it will be a fun one.

After that comes my birth month, August, and this year I plan to wax philosophical with another post in my “Redefining” series, this one called “Redefining Happiness.” Similar to the “It Gets Better” idea for June, I think this post will unpack what society views as happiness and why, and how we as aspec people can redefine that for ourselves. If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you likely know that I despise tropes such as “you’re denying yourself happiness” or any other tropes that attempt to make it seem like happiness is only attainable with a romantic and/or sexual relationship, so I look forward to unpacking that topic on the blog this year.

For there, we get into a few topics that I’ve been kicking around for a while and which I’ve never really had the time or energy to do. It’s possible that the same thing may happen again this year, and if any topics are likely to be moved off in favor of other ones, it would be these two. However, because I’ve been thinking about them for so long, I think it would be interesting to discuss them. The first of these two topics is the idea of the “Spinster archetype,” a discussion which would perfectly dovetail into what I plan to discuss in August, analyzing why this trope in every form is problematic. The second topic would focus on how sci-fi portrays both utopias and dystopias using sex and how these things are different, but ultimately lead to the same uncomfortable truths about how modern writers view the future.

I suspect both of these topics – along with the topics I have planned for the summer – will be large and complex. Therefore, I plan on ending out the year with some lighter topics. One thing you may have noticed is not present in this list so far are any Ace Book Review posts, mostly because having a book review be the only post I do in an entire month feels a bit like a cheat. However, there’s a more practical reason for it too. While many of the books I’ve reviewed for the blog are aspec stories about aspec characters or otherwise satisfy the need for representation, many others I’ve reviewed have their aspec representation buried in the background. While I love seeing that type of representation too, I imagine it makes my reviews for those books a little boring. So, instead of doing a book review post for one specific book, the end of the year will contain a round-up of what I’ve been reading over the year. This will include both aspec specific books and books I’ve enjoyed which may not be aspec, but nevertheless work for me. I’m really looking forward to being able to share these books and unpack elements, even if I’m not doing full reviews of each.

So, although this list is significantly truncated from all the other years I’ve done these previews, I think I have a lot of great plans and I look forward to seeing what I end up working on this year. As I said, I have a lot of other post ideas and I’m sure there are more just waiting to be discovered, so although my work here is changing, it’s not stopping, and that makes me very happy. I’m sending nothing but positive vibes and platonic love to anyone reading this. If you’re still with me on this journey, thank you, and I can’t wait to keep going. See you again in February!