Year In Review

On the last day of 2015, I tweeted:

May 2016 finally be the year you get what you deserve.

— Nick Mamatas (@NMamatas) January 1, 2016

Well. Sorry about that, everyone.

My own year was mixed. The most important thing that happened to me was the death of my dog Kazzie halfway through the year, after fifteen and a half years of life with her. (She even predated this journal.) The last few months were a strain of constant urination and forcing her to eat pills. We nearly put her down on May 1st, but she rallied during our farewell trip to a park. When she stole my son's bagel and ran off with it, I knew she wanted more life. And she got another good three weeks, and the one terrible week, and we had to put her to sleep, finally, on June 1st.

Other than that, my son became very chatty and interesting this year. He was Spider-Man for Halloween and bravely walked up to doors to ring their bells and ask politely for candy.

I released two novels this year: the first US edition of The Last Weekend and I Am Providence. TLW got a very nice review in The San Francisco Chronicle on New Year's Eve, which I foolishly took as a bellwether for the whole year. TLW also was released as an audiobook by Audible.com. IAP came out in August and was widely reviewed, including starred notices in Booklist and Shelf Awareness. It was reprinted three weeks after release, and is my most successful novel thus far.

I wrote a lot of short fiction this year, but only three stories were published:

"Every Ghost Story is a Ghost Story", a noir about a secret society, appeared in the electronic-only anthology The Beauty of Death in July.

"The Great Armored Train", about Trotsky's Red Army train and an encounter with the supernatural during the Polish-Bolshevik war, appeared in issue #35 of Dark Discoveries in July.

"Tom Silex, Spirit-Smasher", a realist story about the inheritor of the copyright to an obscure pulp hero, appeared in issue #18 of New Haven Review (opens PDF) in November.

There was also "Last Night at Manscape", a pornographic mythic story, which will be officially published next May in the anthology Friends of Hyakinthos. It was distributed privately to members of Lethe Press's Patreon as an award in August.

Three stories were reprinted:

Inky, Blinky, Pinky, Nyarlathotep was adapted as an audio podcast by Pseudopod in April.

Der Kommisar's In Town was published in #46 of Nightmare in July.

I also received a Russian-language edition of the anthology Lovecraft's Monsters, which includes a translation my story "That Of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable", in October.

Some editorial bits of note:

I was nominated for the Locus Award for Best Anthology for my day job book, the crime/SF hybrid Hanzai Japan, which was nice.

Also on the day job front, we released an e-mostly mini-anthology called Saiensu Fikushon 2016, which you should totally pick up. Paperback copies were available at World Con in Kansas City, and also at a con in Japan this autumn, but otherwise it is ebook only.

I did some anti-editing by ending my crime fiction magazine The Big Click after three years, in March. Honestly, after Tom Piccirilli, who so inspired me and the magazine, died last summer, I had mentally checked out of the zine anyway. The archive is still up, so check it out.

But crime fiction did play a role in my other editorial project. I curated the initial seed of crime/mystery/detection stories for Great Jones Street, an app for short fiction. I corralled over 100 writers and nearly 300 stories in my assigned genres between August and October, which meant many happy writers getting small checks and me getting a pretty big one. (I also had three SF stories reprinted on the app itself, but chose not to count them above because apps still seem strangely surreal to me.)

Two pieces of non-fiction appeared.

"The People of Horror and Me" was the H-Word column for #48 of Nightmare Magazine in September.

A personal essay about fishing as a child on Long Island, called "Unsound", appeared in the non-fiction anthology Taut Lines: Extraordinary True Fishing Stories in August. So far, the book is only available in the United Kingdom, but it was nice to flex my creative non-fiction muscles again, and the volume is a handsome one.

I also spent this year as President of the Mystery Writers of America's Northern California branch, and helped reinvigorate the moribund chapter by holding meetings on search and rescue dogs, public libraries, and writing historical mysteries, and by having a booth at the Bay Area Book Fest. I also moderated a panel on fantasy fiction at the same festival.

I took a lot of airplanes this year and went to a number of conferences: AWP in LA, Edgar Award Weekend in New York, ICFA in Florida, Locus Award Weekend in Seattle, Worldcon in Kansas City, and Bizarrocon in Portland. I hope to take many fewer airplanes in 2017.

I did not blog much at all. Most of my "Hey there, look at this dumb thing I found!" type commentary migrated over to a friends-mostly Facebook account. I did break 5000 followers on Twitter if you are desperate for more me. Between my day job, which I can not blog about, and my son, which I choose not to blog about, and my spouse, who does not wish to be blogged about, I've simply had little reason to blog. I've also been very busy—I've written 5000 and 10000 words of two new novels this year, finished about twelve short stories, taught at three different places, and had a full slate of books to edit at work as well. I've gotten to the point where I can do fifty pull-ups and fifty burpees in twenty minutes as a morning warm-up, and my blood pressure is down to 110/60. Livejournal is on a low ebb, of course, but I still check in as a reader regularly. To those still putting up diary entries every few days, I salute you and wish I could join you.


Next year will see the release of Mixed Up, a hybrid fiction anthology/cocktail book I am editing with Molly Tanzer, and stories in several anthologies, mostly small press stuff, so I won't name them yet unless they really come out in 2018 or 2019 or 20Never. My first book, Kwangju Diary, will be re-released by The May 18th Memorial Foundation, and distributed for free, in perpetuity.

Like many people, I found politics fascinating and revolting in equal measure this year. I take a long-term view of events as best I can, but the worrisome thing about the phrase "This too shall pass" is that it ultimately refers to life as we know it as much as it refers to anything else.

So good luck out there, everyone, and stay strong.