The Temporal Turnstile: Looking Back To Look Forward

The year is nearly complete.

With a brand new year ready to grow in its corpse.

Ah. Looking back, looking back. No regrets. Not much purpose. I don’t truck with regret. It offers me little. Regret is one of those vestigial emotions — it’s just a hanger-on, like a dingleberry or a hardened booger. Recognizing problems and moving forward is one thing, but clinging to the driftwood of your prior wreckage is just a worthless endeavor.

Swim forward or drown and all that.

So, 2013, then.

Been a great year, ultimately. My wife disentangled from her own professional life, leaving my writing career as the only provider of income for der Wendighaus, which is awesome in the truest sense of the word. Our toddler has grown in leaps and bounds and is now an actual human with increasing wants and needs and opinions. And also the occasional inexplicable tantrum which manifests like a tornado — by the time it’s there, it’s too late to get out of its way so all you can do is run to the basement and wait it out.

I traveled a lot. I went to Australia. I met phenomenal creative humans there — people I dare call friends as well as cohorts in this creative life. I fought an army of koalas with nothing but my fists and a pair of dirty underwear. I rode a cassowary. I did epic karaoke. You know. The usual.

I dunno. Life blurs. I’m like, “I know things happened?”

In 2013, I released the following books:

The Blue Blazes (the criminal underworld meets the mythic underworld!).

Unclean Spirits (the gods have fallen to earth and one man seeks vengeance against them!)

Beyond Dinocalypse (far-flung psychic dinosaur dystopia and the pulp heroes that battle there!)

Under the Empyrean Sky (oppressed dustbowl teens in a cornpunk future fight for love!)

The Kick-Ass Writer (1001 nuggets of boot-on-your-neck writing advice!).

I released a new Miriam Black short story, “Birds of Paradise” in the mystery and crime collection called Malfeasance Occasional: Girl Trouble.

I also put out my first (and ideally not my last) comic: a six-page pulp-action adventure starring occult adventurer Amanda Wynne: “Shackleton’s Hooch.”

And I’m working on my first serialized story — “The Forever Endeavor,” presently in the middle of its run at Fireside Fiction Company.

I wrote a buncha stuff this year, too.

I wrote Beyond Dinocalypse, which as noted, released this year.

I wrote Heartland, Book Two: Blightborn.

I wrote The Cormorant, the third Miriam Black novel.

I wrote a thing called The Nail — a horror novel I don’t know what to do with, yet. It needs a lot of work but I’m not sure exactly which direction to take it — lot of options. It’s kind of a keystone piece for me and ties together a lot of the mythologies of my many stories (you’ll find some of that too in “The Forever Endeavor,” actually, if you pay attention).

I wrote another YA thing I can’t talk about.

I co-wrote what I hope is a killer comic pitch with friend and fellow madman Adam Christopher.

And I wrote another novel-flavored thing I can’t talk about. (But may be able to soon…)

Plus, I blogged here every week.

All told, I think I wrote about —

*does some loose calculations*

*uses fingers, toes, nipples, antennae*

390,000 words of new fiction.

And about, mmm, conservatively, 200,000 words here at the blog.

A pleasing quantity. I cannot speak for the quality, sadly. But I’m hopeful!

In 2014… whew, yeah, wow.

I’ve got a lot of work to do.

I’ve got four novels to write in the next 10 months or so. /panic

I believe I’ll have a script to write, too, but I can’t say anything about that yet.

Plus, soon will be some Big Awesome Stuff announced. Some book-flavored news. Hopefully a comic thing. Maybe some news about a film or TV deal about one of my book series…

I’ve got some books landing on shelves in the next year, too:

The Cormorant releases very, very soon (January 1st!). Worth noting I’ll be launching that book at WORD Bookstore in Brooklyn on January 8th.

Summer will bring Blightborn, the second Heartland book. With that, if you pre-order, you’ll see a new Gwennie short story, “The Wind Has Teeth Tonight.” I’m actually really excited for Blightborn to release. It’s much bigger and sprawlier (*not a word) than Under the Empyrean Sky. Expands the world greatly. Ups the stakes. Was a great deal of fun to write.

Sometime soon you’ll also see the retitled and reworked YA launch of heroine Atlanta Burns in — drum roll please — a book simply titled: Atlanta Burns.

Plus, maybe a few other surprises. Giggle-snort-blush.

I’ll be traveling a lot, too. I’ll put up a more official schedule in the next week or two but I’ll be at Pike’s Peak Writing Conference, Phoenix Comic-Con, the Tucson Book Fest, and more.

So, there it is. That’s all she wrote.

How was your 2013?

How’s 2014 looking?