My Writing Year 2020

As has become annual I thought I'd write a quick blog post as to my literary achievements during 2020.

It goes without saying - but here I find myself saying it anyway - that 2020 has been rather an odd year. However, whilst I've barely written any fiction at all in the last twelve months, that isn't due to circumstances created by Covid-19. Towards the end of last year I found myself getting increasingly disillusioned with fiction, and had already begun a non-fiction work which has taken up most of 2020. Additionally, I've had an absolute ton of freelance proofreading, copyediting and critiquing to do, in addition to the day job (which has remained constant through the various lockdowns). So whilst Covid-19 has created an environment within which I'm a little unsure how to write my way through it, the virus itself hasn't been a deciding factor in my work.

Usually I aim to write a short story a month, but that went totally out of the window. In fact, I've only worked on two pieces. I revamped an older story titled "Where Do Broken Dreams Go?" which I felt deserved a second look, and I added a few hundred words to the ending. I also collaborated with Eugen Bacon - a writer whose work I've discovered this year and whose poetic language has inspired me - on a short story titled "Messier 94".

What I have been writing is a non-fiction book of around 75,000 words which is currently being read by a prospective publisher. I don't want to give too many details away, but I've spent the year interviewing various actors and members of the film industry. In that respect, lockdown has been a massive benefit, because these individuals who would otherwise been working have happily answered my questions and had time for me. Hopefully, I'll be able to report more about this in 2021.

I sold three short stories this year: "The Girl With The Horizontal Walk" was selected as a reprint for Best British Short Stories 2020 (Salt Publishing) by editor Nicholas Royle, "Fetch" to Sein und Werden, and "The Ice-Cream Blonde" to Crimewave magazine.

The following four stories were published this year: "Dirty Snow" online at The Crime Readers Association website where it can still be read in full, "My Somnambulant Heart" in Terror Tales of the Home Counties, "Fetch" in Sein und Werden (read online in full here too) and the aforementioned "The Girl With The Horizontal Walk" in Best British Short Stories 2020 through Salt Publishing. This year also saw me occasionally reviewing books for Black Static magazine.

In addition to the short stories, I had two books published in 2020. My biography of The Mysterious N Senada, which I wrote after decoding the Bavarian composer's diaries, titled "O For Obscurity, Or, The Story Of N", was published by the Eyeball Museum in association with Psychofon Records with a version coupled with The Residents' recording of Senada's "Pollex Christi" magnum opus, and my eighth short story collection, "Frequencies of Existence" was published through NewCon Press.

I have a handful of stories awaiting publication that were originally accepted in previous years, and a few novels are also under consideration by various agents/publishers, as they were last year. 

So that's it for 2020, a year most of us will be glad to see the back of!