2012 in Review

This will be my last blog entry for 2012, so I felt like writing a little retrospective

One thing is for sure, it’s been a much better year than 2011, which was hectic, chaotic and unsettling due to the March 11 earthquake and changing jobs internally at the day job after having done the same old thing for some eight years.

In 2012 I got used to wrangling my new day job tasks, published my “She Should Have Called Him Siegfried” novel, and almost published my second novella via Dark Quest Books. The “Lord of Water” is still under the “forthcoming” books, I guess/hope it’s release will happen in January 2013.

“Dome Child” and also “She Should Have Called Him Siegfried” won prizes, though, unfortunately, some doubts have come up as to the legitimacy of these awards…

I still don’t have an agent or a major book deal – the big sharks of the industry are yet ignoring me small fish, but I got some interest raised here and there, if nothing substantial has resulted from it yet. I reconnected with the WorldCon community by attending Chicon 7 in Chicago and as almost every year the learning curve was steep.

I have another four novels in the drawer. The goal was to make all of them submission ready in 2012, I managed to get 3 ready, well, not too bad. I also revised my first ever longer publication, good old “Dark Matters” and its new version is now with the publisher for review.

My record for churning out a first draft of a novel is five weeks. Just two days ago I had another record – the longest first draft ever. I finally finished the first draft of a second volume of one of the yet unpublished novels. I started with that one in autumn 2011, but then got interrupted by day job changes and the task to make the existing novels submission ready and to release “Siegfried”, and put it aside for quite a while. I’m very relieved that two days ago I wrote the final words under that draft, which took me thus one year and three months to finish. The pure writing time was of course much shorter. I must say I found it highly annoying to have something half finished lying around for so long and it is not my intention to repeat this experience.

So, what will 2013 hopefully bring?

First of all I’ll attend another Odyssey Online Course and then I hope for the publication of “Lord of Water” in January. Next, I expect something to happen with good old “Dark Matters”, third, a sequel for “She Should Have Called Him Siegfried” is due. In fact I started writing it yesterday I’m planning on releasing Siegfried II in autumn, before I will go for the first time ever to World Fantasy Con (instead of World SF Con), the membership is already bought and the hotel booked. Apart from that 2013 will be a year of submission, submission, submission… = courting sharks with the yet unpublished novels.

Let’s see what happens and wish me luck with the sharkies… good luck to you all as well and Happy New 2013!