2025 YEAR IN REVIEW

2025 Year in Review. I should have got this out a little earlier (within the actual year would have been nice, I suppose) but I was galivanting up and down the coast, visiting people and playing with dogs and eating like a king (who doesn't need to lose at least 30kg). Anyway...

22 publications this (last) year. Not a terrible effort. I'm proud to have been published in these anthologies, to have been chosen by these publishers, and of course to have been in print along side so many wonderful authors.

At this point I would normally talk about the year I had and the challenges I faced, but frankly, it's January, I'm already patting down the dirt atop the shallow grave of 2025 with the back of the shovel so I'll blow past it and just wish everyone a happy new year.

PS I also worked on some novels I'll hopefully include in my 2026 YIR.

Comments

2022 - Year in Review

A challenging year, but I'm proud of the work I managed to create. On the publishing front I saw my work appear in fifteen published anthologies. That's one more than last year, which is actually more impressive than it sounds because for the last seven months of this year I also took a day job (because, as fun as it's been to write full time, it's not generating a liveable income just yet – I need to get some full books out there). Casual day work (mostly at night), but that's still anywhere between twelve and fifty hours a week not in front of a computer. Instead standing on my feet, destroying my arches, and making it hard to sit at a computer to write, needing days to recover from the pain. So, with limited time, I still got done what I did, and I'm proud of that. I'm still pumping out short stories because it helps flesh out my worlds. With each new short, I discover something new about that world. It's a journey of discovery. With each new stor...

100 stories published

So about 7 or 8 stories ago, I passed a benchmark without noticing. The gaps between call, submissions, and publication vary by some dramatically huge margins, so it would require quite the audit to name the precise one that made it over the line (also some of those are flash/micro fiction but many of those are also recorded in groups/batches as just one so hard to pin down). OVER 100 STORIES PUBLISHED First story published in late 2020. So it's been a busy four or five years. I'm not making a living off this yet and maybe I never will. But that's a nice benchmark to cross. I don't update this site often, and I need to populate the timeline/genre page. I will soon, maybe throw up some maps for the fantasy side of things. At least I have the excuse of clearly being very busy. I'll pat myself on the back there.

Horrorween

Halloween's becoming a lot like Christmas. It's starts creeping in a month or so early. Give Oktoberfest so breathing room, people. No doubt we'll see Christmas stuff up Nov 1, and Hotcross buns out on Boxing Day. Thus is the cycle of life. Perhaps we need to embrace more religious holidays to fill the rest of the year out with treats and costumes. But I do love this time of year. I'm currently working as a security officer at a fun park as day (evening) job. They're doing a Halloween thing for a couple weeks, so I'm often standing on a deck watching Silent Hill nurses cavort and convulse in the bloody uniforms and bandaged heads, to terrorise folk as they enter the park. It's an agonising job as I stand for hours on feet that aren't built for it (collapsed arches, a heel issue, etc). It's literal torture, motivating me to get as many books out into the world and sell a million copies of each. It's like a reverse cop show/movie trope: after year...

Wyrmblood

Search This Blog