My Fifties in Writing

My 60th birthday tomorrow, and time look back at my fifties in terms of the writing.

In January 2008, when I turned fifty, I had five pro story sales to my name, a lot of small press credits in for-the-love markets, a total of five sales to mainly small press anthologies, and a handful of novels in print in the US small press at Black Death Books. Island Life had gone out of print, and I’d just had a failed year trying something different, writing a straight crime novel (failed), a children’s novel (failed) and I was working on an “Ice Zombies take Manhattan” thing I wasn’t at all sure about. The main thing that was keeping me going was the memory of a sale to the pro anthology NOVA SCOTIA where I’d rubbed shoulders with Hugo and Nebula award winners, but even that thought was fading quickly into the past.

I was new in Newfoundland, with no regular income to speak of, and staring into a void.

Fast forward ten years. I’ve been selling regularly to pro markets with over eighty pro-rate story sales, I’ve had novels, novellas and collections published in some of the better known genre presses, I’ve sold books to foreign markets, and have numerous appearances in anthologies from the big name publishers. I have a lovely shelf of deluxe hardcovers of my work, and a full bookcase of paperbacks of my books and antho appearances.

And we haven’t starved. Which is nice. It’s been a golden period, ten years that I could hardly have imagined back in 2008.

I sense that some of it will slip away a bit now, with the demise of DarkFuse and Dark Renaissance, but I have new places to conquer, new paths to walk, and there’s still the dream of fortune and glory to pursue.

I wonder what my sixties will bring?

Onward!