Month-in-Review Highlights: July 2025

Me exhibiting my supreme dorkitude during a tour of the Pont du Gard in France. Photo credit: Arnaud Chevallier. July 25, 2025.

I postmortem each month shortly after it ends. Previously, I used these posts to hold myself accountable on progress toward my annual goals. Starting in January 2023, I broadened these posts to address more generally my observations and experiences for the month. (To read previous months’ reviews, click here.)

July was nicely split into two halves: The first half, I focused on getting ahead with work and projects and life maintenance so that, in the second half, I could focus more on spending time with family visiting France and with my spouse, who is on summer break until mid-August.

Progress across all fronts in the first half of the month went well, but “progress” doesn’t mean you don’t progress into a wall. With my fiction writing, I hit the wall.

I’ve come to the conclusion that yet another novel I’ve worked on so hard to revise this year won’t work in its current form. I still like the idea and feel strongly about the theme, but the story and its characters won’t work to do either justice. Instead, to do it right, I’ll need to start over from scratch. I can do that, sure I can, but I don’t know that I have the stomach for the do-over straightaway. The realization came as a serious smack-down and I haven’t staggered my way back up quite yet. (I have before and I will again, have no fear.)

Yet another novel in the drawer—the third in the past few years—hasn’t made work on my other novel-in-progress very enthusiastic, but so it goes. I’ve learned through experience that I can never tell when looking at a revised draft which sections were written with verve and which weren’t, so that gives me just enough heart to keep going with the other novel, even if I’m not “feeling it” in the moment.

The change of pace in the third week of July, occasioned by meeting my mother and her husband in Provence to show them one of my favorite parts of France, helped pull me out of my wallow a little. The trip went far too quickly, but we had fun, and it was a delight to spend time with them in a beautiful, warm, sunny place with smiling faces all around.

I didn’t turn on my computer for the entire trip.

We came back to Lausanne for the final week of July to catch up on to-dos and life maintenance, though at a much more relaxed pace than our norm. Summer mode prevails.

On to August.