2013 Writing Year in Review

2012 was an extremely busy publishing year for me. My first collection came out, along with my first book as editor. By comparison, I didn’t do much publishing in 2013, but I certainly kept busy.

I only published two short stories in 2013: “Ripperology” in Ross Lockhart’s Tales of Jack the Ripper and “Night’s Foul Bird” in the special “wings” theme issue of Innsmouth Magazine. I’m pretty proud of both stories, and both publications would make great holiday gifts, wink wink, nudge nudge.

I also wrote the introduction for the reissue of J.B. Priestley’s novel Benighted for Valancourt Books. It’s the book that The Old Dark House was adapted from, and both book and movie are among my favorites, so I was very proud to get to write the introduction. The book looks absolutely great, too, with one of the best covers I’ve ever seen. Another great gift, if you’re in the market.

A lot of the energy that might otherwise have gone toward getting some of my stories written and published in 2013 instead went toward another project. I was approached by Skull Island eXpeditions, the fiction arm of Privateer Press, to do some licensed fiction for their Iron Kingdoms setting. Having been an Iron Kingdoms fan for years, it was a pretty big deal for me, and I approached it with due excitement. My first project was a novelette about General Gerlak Slaughterborn, which appeared in their Called to Battle anthology. I also spent a chunk of 2013 working on a novella for them, which will be coming out sometime in the beginning of the New Year. Entitled Mutagenesis, it tells the origin of Thagrosh Hellborne and the Legion of Everblight. You’ll be hearing more about it soon.

I’m really happy with both of them, and I regard them as a part of my body of writing every bit as much as my own short stories are. So if you like my work in general, I think you’ll like these, too. I’m looking forward to doing more work with them in the coming years.

Getting a chance to work with Privateer Press would be big enough news for any one normal year, but even that wasn’t the biggest thing that happened to me in 2013. Because 2013 was also the year I quit my proverbial day job to start writing full time. That was about three months ago, and so far it’s gone off pretty well. I’ve had flush spells and dry spells, but overall it’s been great, and I’m very happy to see where it takes me in 2014!