End of Year Report
Happy New Year everybody!
First off, thanks to everyone who took advantage of my publisher's Holiday Special and snagged a cheap copy of TimeSplash. Astute shoppers will notice that the offer has now closed. Personally, I'd like to keep the price that low all year round but it's not up to me. Instead, I hope you'll find it is still good value at the price the publisher sets. You'll still find it discounted on sites like Amazon, and Fictionwise – just not quite so much.
New Year's Resolutions
I'd like to tell you about my resolutions, but I didn't make any. I never do. I have enough plans and goals to keep any anal retentive happy, I just don't set them at the turn of the year. My Big Push for the year is to get an agent. Hopefully, I'll achieve this before all the book shops (and then all the publishers) go out of business, otherwise my exciting new agent won't have anyone left to sell my books to. In a way, it would be nice if all the book shops (and publishers) stopped yelling at the tide to go back and just quietly turned up their toes. At least then the market would be nice and simple again. We'd all be self-publishing because there would be no other way to get a book out.
It's nice that the agents I'm approaching tell me I write very well and so on, but it would be nicer if they didn't also say things like "but I'm getting out of the fiction market before I starve," or "but I can only take on one new client per decade now and their books have to give me an orgasm whenever I touch the title page." When the book shops have all gone broke, and the publishers have all gone broke, the agents will have to get jobs as freelance editors or book publicists for all the self-publishing authors who are also going broke.
Work In Progress
Meanwhile, I keep on tapping at the old keyboard. My current WIP is tentatively called Mindrider and is based on one of my short stories of the same name. It's dark. The protagonist is an alien parasite who lives in people's brains and it's sometimes just a tiny bit difficult to make him a sympathetic character. But I like a challenge. It's all written in first person from the parasite's POV too. Another challenge. I'm enjoying it so much, I can easily see me doing a whole series based on these characters. I'm 50,000 words into it, with maybe another 40,000 to go. Then I can get back to the space opera this book interrupted – about a 10,000-year-old robot who is helping humanity fight off an alien invasion. You know what? Being a writer is like being a kid in a toy shop. There are so many wonderful things to play with, you don't know what to pick up next. There are a couple of anthologies I'd like to do stories for too (actually, four) but I'm so much into novel-writing these days that I write very few short stories.
2010 In Review
Not shabby at all.
Concluding Remarks
By for now. I'm looking forward to chatting with you all in 2011. So don't be shy now, and don't be a stranger. There's plenty of space in the comments section below for everybody. I hope you all have a good and successful year too.
Graham.
