My Writing Year 2023

As has become annual I thought I'd write a quick blog post as to my literary achievements during 2023.

Starting with short fiction, I wrote forty-eight short stories: "Elevator Pitch", "Some Pastel Morning", "Sundowning", "Betaville", "Inversion Layer", "The Good Men", "Water In The Wrong Light", "The Aspect", "An Absence of Ghosts", "Easter Woman", "Perfect Love", "Picnic Boy", "End of Home", "Amber", "Japanese Watercolor", "Secrets", "Die in Terror", "Red Rider", "My Second Wife", "Floyd", "Suburban Bathers", "Dimples and Toes", "The Nameless Souls", "Love Leaks Out", "Act of Being Polite", "Medicine Man", "Tragic Bells", "Loss of Innocence", "The Simple Song", "Ups and Downs", "Possessions", "Give it to Someone Else", "Phantom", "Less Not More", "My Work is So Behind", "Birds in the Trees", "Handful of Desire", "Moisture", "Love is...", "Troubled Man", "La La", "Loneliness", "Nice Old Man", "The Talk of Creatures", "Fingertips", "In Between Dreams", "Margaret Freeman", "The Coming of the Crow" and "When We Were Young". This is a huge leap over the number of stories I normally write over the course of a year, but I should mention that forty of these stories were of exactly 1000 words each in length (intended for a collection I'll mention later), so the word count isn't as much as you might think. I haven't written any longer works this year, so in total I've written around 70-75,000 words.

I sold one short story this year. "Some Pastel Morning" to IZ Digital. This is mostly because I haven't submitted much for publication as most of the stories I've written this year are earmarked for collections.

The following six stories were published this year: "An Absence of Ghosts" in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #73, "Some Pastel Morning" in IZ Digital (click story title to read), "So Close To Home" in the anthology Languages of Water, "The Enfilade" in Black Static, "The Natural Environment" in the anthology Reports From The Deep End, and "Keepers" in the anthology At The Lighthouse.

This year also saw me shortlisted for a British Fantasy Society Award for my collection, "Candescent Blooms" published by Salt Publishing. My collaborative novel, co-written with Eugen Bacon, "Secondhand Daylight", was published in October 2023 by Cosmic Egg and has been getting some good reviews. And the forty 1000 word short stories mentioned above will appear in a collection I'll be announcing next year. I've also been co-editing a free Arts magazine for Norwich with Thomas Jarvis called Tangerine, in my spare time.

With my publishing hat on, Head Shot Press published one book in 2023 which was the anthology, "Bang!", edited by myself, featuring noir stories from twenty-two writers. The dedicated website for the press can be found here.

Unlike previous years, I currently have no short stories awaiting publication and am completely up to date. As usual, there are a few longer projects that are under consideration by various agents/publishers.

So that's it for 2023. I have a few things in mind already for next year and am looking to see where they take me. Onwards!