2023: The year of the grated escape

Have you ever wanted to run away?

Some escapes are smooth, audacious and seamless. They are carefully planned, perfectly executed: the whole package of well-timed disappearance. I envy the escapologists who can enact such cohesive plans. They have an outfit, a patter, a mechanism.

My own vanishing act in 2023 involved losing a little bit of myself at a time, in snatched hours, in between interruptions. There goes an eyebrow. A toe. Then some internal organs, and maybe, if I’m lucky, a hour or two of total immersion in the onstage tank. My attention span has been struggling, recently. I’m a sliced-up writer these days, but hey, lots of the greatest things are grated, and you can’t always see the join once it’s all been melted together.

Or maybe that’s just cheese on toast.

Anyway. It’s been another weird year. Here’s what I got up to, writing-wise:

I wrote a lot of flash fiction! I know, grated fiction. Little shredded bits that started clumping, and became shark-infested. I wrote one a week for the year, and put them up on the blog (under the Small Objects tab) with a photo. Sometimes the photo inspired the fiction, and something the fiction inspired the photo. I knew I wasn’t going to get to a lot of well-honed short story writing this year, so this was a great way to explore a lot of ideas at speed, although it kept struggling to turn into a narrative. Sometimes I felt like I was wrestling the shark armed only with a pencil and a mobile phone. The end of 2023 will mark the end of the project, but I’ll leave the tab up for a while, and maybe one or two pieces will get turned into something longer. Or maybe grated fiction bits are better than big blocks, every now and again. They’ve got peppy bite.

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Although I didn’t write many short stories, I did have a few published:

Possibilities are Endless turned up in the very last edition of Black Static in July 2023. It’s a story about people who have certain opportunities physically removed from them, and what that process might look like. I’m very sad to see the end of Black Static. It was one of the first magazines to publish my weirder, darker fiction, and I have always been very proud to see my work in it, along with so many other talented writers.

Cloister Fox is just beginning its magazine life, and I hope it runs for a long time. It takes one word as a prompt and asks authors to produce something unforgettably strange. My story Clean Up was for an issue with the key word of ‘ruins’, and it details a long-term experiment that escapes into the world, leaving all kinds of mess in its wake.

I was thrilled to be part of Peach Pit, an anthology of short stories determined to put some morally grey women front and centre. What an amazing line up. I wrote Composition, an origin story using the necrobiome as inspiration.

I’d long been looking for an opportunity to write about the tunnel of Eupalinos, having visited it a few years ago. Then the chance to be in one of the Terror Tales series of books – Terror Tales of the Mediterranean – came along and I got to try to convey some of the really scary atmosphere of that ancient tunnel in Meet in the Middle, my story of a midlife crisis that leads to the island of Samos, and a wonder of the ancient world.

And in October I wrote a 4,500 word short story in a day for the Green Ink Sponsored Write challenge. It went by the title of Within the Well (the prompt being ‘a well of strength, the strength of will’) so of course it featured a well. It also featured a lot of other things that tend to pop into my head when I leave it unsupervised, including talking animals, huge palaces, and tapestries. I just like tapestries. Thank you to everyone who sponsored me. The story was collected into an anthology for those who donated.

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I didn’t have a new novel published in 2023, but I’ve finished writing two. One is a collaboration with another writer I hugely admire, and we had the best time writing a fantasy novel that I am just so flipping proud of. What a great experience it was. I’ll hopefully be able to tell you more about where that will be published shortly.

The other is a novel I’ve been working on for three years, finding bits of it here and there, ready-grated, and I’ve been trying to piece it into a workable shape. It’s not been an easy write but I set myself the task of finishing the year with it pressed into a shape I like, and I think I’m about there.

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Non-fiction! I wrote about writing for Writing the Future, and I concentrated on researching science fiction, and how to tie the real to the created. There were some incredible essays in this book, so I really recommend getting a copy if you’re interesting in creating SF of your own.

I popped up at Five Books – a site I really like for recommendations in so many genres – to talk about my five picks for SF novels that go heavy on the body horror.

Interzone magazine has seen a lot of changes in the past year, but I’m really glad that my regular column, Climbing Stories, is still part of the line-up. I’ve written about what alien goddesses might smell like and why we should always press a big red button when we find one, along with lots of other things. Hopefully I’ll keep writing them throughout 2024.

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Speaking of 2024, the big thing for me right now is the upcoming publication of Three Eight One, my experimental quest novel that meanders around with all the genres. It will be available from 16th January.  If you’re going to read it, I hope you enjoy it. It’s been a wild adventure.

There will be another longer project of mine getting out there in the world around Easter in 2024. I can’t say much about yet, but I’m really excited about it. ( I know, veiled reveals like this are really annoying. Sorry.)

Short story-wise, I’ve written a couple for themed anthologies based on concepts so good that it’s going to be brilliant to see what else people have written. I love being a part of a killer anthology.

I’m hoping to write more short stories in 2024, and also I’ve been thinking about novellas again. I really love novellas.

But for now, I’m in between longer projects and in between years. Here’s to tiny stretches of time that sit between the usual stuff. They are grate. Thank you to everyone who has been involved in these projects throughout 2023, and thank you to everyone who has read my words, read the blog, read anything of mine. Have a great Christmas. I will drop by between Christmas and the new year to talk about my favourite reads of 2023, and then… let’s run away some more. Keep running. Thattaway.