Happy New Year, friends. neighbors, and Internet People!
I hope you all had a pleasant holiday. The days are getting longer again, which up here in US!New England is a great and glad thing. The worst of our winter’s still ahead, but every day we claw a minute back from the darkness. Of course, last year was the warmest year on record—though, as I understand this sort of thing, ‘warmer’ means ‘the system is higher-energy’ which, in turn, means ‘you’ll experience greater extremes of hot and cold,’ which certainly does reflect Boston 2014. Let’s see how 2015 fares.
In terms of work, 2014 was a pretty good year for me. For Your Consideration, as they say in the Academy, my year in writing consisted of the following:
Novels
Full Fathom Five, Tor Books, about which you can find more relevant information on its page on this very site. Lots of people seemed to think this was a standout book from me, which was gratifying. It’s certainly the book with which I crossed the greatest gulfs of despair and hope in my career so far—but that’s just my subjective experience of the writing process!
Short Fiction
A Kiss with Teeth, a charming vampire story, on Tor.com
Late Nights at the Cape and Cane, a story about supervillains hanging out in a bar, at Uncanny Magazine
The Angelus Guns, a tale of angelic revolution and time travel inspired by a mishearing of the lyrics to The Foggy Dew, on Tor.com
This was a fun year in short fiction for me! One of the many things I like about short fiction is that, since the text’s comparatively short, I can hold an entire short piece in my head at once, and tell if e.g. I’m overusing a certain image or leaning too much on a certain sort of description. Of course, that means I work short pieces over and over and over again before they go anywhere, which means short pieces take a very long time to gestate.
Fan Work
I’m given to understand that this blog, which I spent a lot of time on in 2014, is technically a Fan Work, and I am a Fan Writer. This is only fair, I think—I’ve been a Fan about ten times as long as I’ve been anything that you could remotely term “professional,” at least by the dictionary definition of the term. Then again, the dictionary definition may not apply here!
My most popular 2014 posts turn out to have been Ghostbusting Lovecraft, the Goblins post in which I independently derived the backstory of the Orks from Warhammer 40k (turns out cool ideas get around!), and, trailing those two by a large margin, my post on Robert Jordan and the Plinkett Test of Character Design, as well as one of my personal favorite essays of the year, the Die Hard and Fairy Tales post.
And here’s to 2015!
By way of spoilers: right now I’m working on another Choice of Game set in the Craft Sequence universe, which will hit virtual shelves this year. Of course, Last First Snow debuts in July—preorder early, preorder often! Or else Temoc will get angry! Of course he may get angry even if you don’t preorder anything! Getting angry is something he does, is what I’m trying to say! I’m in the sixth or so draft of Craft Sequence Book 4 as we speak, which features many old familiar faces, and should be on my editor’s desk at the end of the month.
After that, I’m scheming deeply about a self-contained novel, plus the next Craft Sequence book of course. And a just-for-the-hell of it side project. And something which you know what I’ll just leave this here for now.
So, that means I’m possibly on the hook to deliver a game, two novels, and a handful of shorter fiction this year. It’s been nice knowing y’all! *gulp*
I have a couple open questions, if you’ve made it this far:
1. I’ve thought about writing a small pamphlet about my editing process—something describing the steps I’ve passed through to turn a book like, say, FF5, from a first draft to its final form, including notes on conception, developmental editing, and language editing. Would any of you be interested in this? I might do it regardless, as a passion project, but if there was some interest that would shift it up my priority list.
2. Would people be interested in t-shirts, Muerte Coffee mugs, or something similar?
And now, for something sorta sappy—
As I’m looking back at this post, at the work it describes & the work it forecasts, there’s something missing in this account of text: people. In weeks like I’ve had recently (to wit: nose, meet grindstone), it’s easy to focus so much on the language and the keyboard and the stories and the same five video game scores I listen to on repeat because I can’t do words with words in my ears. And, you know, there’s a decent sort of easy social component of the writer’s life, all bitterness and coffee and bourbon or whiskey or whatever’s your jam, and of course let’s not forget the creeping sense of failure. But really, I’m here, for now, to tell stories—and storytelling is about the audience. I tell stories to and for my friends, because dammit the things they do are magic. I tell stories to my family, to my loved ones, to strangers who stop by and listen for a few minutes or years.
So, thank you. Stay a while. I have great things planned.