The year 2016 is coming to an end. It wasn't a bad year for me by any means, not as good as 2015 was (one of the best years of my life) but certainly nothing to complain about. On a geopolitical scale the year will probably go down in history as being pivotal, a time when vast changes were set in motion. It is really not easy to predict the future. My efforts in that direction fail nearly every time, and so do those of most others. I regard Brexit as a disaster but its full ramifications can't be known for a long time yet. Let's wait and see.This year I had a new collection of short fiction published, a book beautifully produced by the wonderful Egaeus Press called Brutal Pantomimes that I am especially pleased with. It contains a story 'The Jam of Hypnos' and a novella 'The Impossible Inferno' that are among the two best things I have ever written (in my own view at least!). The book sold well.
My 1996 novella Elusive Plato was also republished, by Bizarro Pulp Press, but this did much less well. In fact it sold very few copies, even though reader demand had prompted the reprint in the first place. The publishing world is a baffling place at times!
Finally my sequence of linked historical fantasies Sangria in the Sangraal was published in an expanded and updated edition by Eibonvale Press and this was launched just a few weeks ago. The story behind this book is almost as convoluted as the story inside it. The initial idea for the collection came with the visit I made, purely by chance, to the little town of Albarracín back in September 2007. It has taken more than nine years to get from that visit to the final version of the story cycle.As for writing new material... I completed two short novels in 2016 (or perhaps they can more accurately be termed novellas). The Honeymoon Gorillas is a 'weird Western' that I plan to submit to a publisher sometime in 2017 (I have a specific one in mind). Cloud Farming in Wales is a very unorthodox fantasia that was partly inspired by Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America and it has already found a publisher and has a provisional publication date of June 2017.
Every year I set myself the target of writing 100,000 words of new fiction as a minimum threshold. Last year I failed to meet my target. This year I easily exceeded it. Next year I plan to be less strict with myself about this figure. This doesn't mean I am going to slacken on my projects, simply that I won't be stressing about targets for wordage.
Projects for 2017 include a collection of short fiction called The Seashell Contract with all proceeds going to charity, and a book of ghost stories called The Ghost Comedians. I will also be attempting to write a novella for TOR. It's also high time I finally finished the novel I have been working on since 1994, The Clown of the New Eternities. But I say that every year... Let's see!
HAPPY NEW YEAR to you all!