Every year, DeeAnn and I send holiday cards to friends and family. We used to print out a one-page newsletter to stick inside each card, which would include a handwritten note, but as our mailing list got longer the time investment became untenable. So we now compose one brief update for everyone and drop-ship the lot from PaperCulture.
Writing-wise, I didn’t have a lot of publications this year. (I keep saying I want to get back to short fiction, but something else always seems to take priority. So for 2020, I’ve committed to posting ONE NEW SHORT STORY EVERY MONTH on Curious Fictions.) But here’s everything that came out in 2019, in roughly chronological order…
- I was one of the writers for the first season of Serial Box’s Ninth Step Station, created by Malka Older. I’m credited on episode 3 “The Fallen Executive,” episode 6 “The Stolen Xiǎohái,” and episode 9 “The Assassin’s Nest” (co-written with Fran Wilde). Season 2 is coming early next year!
- If you’re looking for new KANGAROO content, pick up a copy of the space opera anthology Infinite Stars: Dark Frontiers, which includes my short story “Fire in the Pocket” showing Equipment Officer Oliver’s first introduction to… well, a few different things and people in the K-verse.
- I started posting reprints to Curious Fictions (including my 2018 Playboy story “Go, Space Racer!”). That one you can read for free; some others are pay-per-view or free-to-subscribers. I’ve also posted some original content (more to come next year, as mentioned above):
- “Defeated,” co-written with DeeAnn at the Rainforest Writers Village a few years back;
- “Fresh Off the Bod,” one of my can’t-get-arrested shorts; and
- By the Light of the Moon, the first novel I ever won NaNoWriMo with. (Fair warning: it’s short, and not very polished.)
I have been spending a fair amount of time working on new, standalone novels. The AI-taking-over-the-world techno-thriller is still out on submission; I’ve gotten beta reader notes on the contemporary fantasy and will get back to revising that next month, probably; and I’m finishing up the first draft of this year’s NaNoWriMo project, a science fiction soap opera (the original idea was “Arthur Hailey’s HOTEL in space” but we’ll see how it actually turns out). Don’t worry, I do plan to get back to Kangaroo next year, one way or another.
In other news, Puzzled Pint is now officially a 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity, and we now have a Board of Directors (mostly the same people, just with legally accountable titles now) working on several things to make the organization sustainable for many years to come. We aim to have a better handle on stuff by the time our ten-year anniversary rolls around next July!
Here’s hoping you also have good memories from 2019 to carry forward, and fun stuff to anticipate in 2020.
