'22 in Review

Phew. Well that was quite a year.

A fair bit happened, just for me personally (I'm not even going to try to summarise the year's political upheavals or all the cool people we lost.) It went something like this:

I got an agent (properly speaking, I signed with the Ki Agency last year, but couldn't officially announce it, for Reasons, till well into this year.) I'm still with Ki and looking forward to more excitement in 2023, but now represented by agency founder Meg Davis, as Anne Perry has moved on to become the new commissioning editor at Jo Fletcher Books. Anne has been an absolute star and I hope we get to work together again in the future.

I had a novel published under a new pen name, to excellent reviews and pretty good sales. 

I wrote two complete novels in 2022, and am partway through a third. That took up the bulk of my time and energy work-wise this year, but I also managed to place three stories with publications due out in 2023: 'Are We Going Under?' will appear in ParSec Magazine, 'Kingbreaker' in Shakespeare Unleashed, and 'The Flight Of Ravens' in Unknown Superheroes Vs The Forces of Darkness. 

On top of all that, I started a podcast, No Darkness But Ours, with my friend and colleague Gemma Files, in which we discuss horror in all its forms. Topics so far have included snowbound horror, the work and legacy of M.R. James, and Folk Horror. We're currently in the middle of a discussion on Queer Horror, with more to come. You can check our work out here.  

Under my own byline, the following was published this year:

Short Fiction:

Nemesis of Wire (Phantasmagoria #20, ed. Trevor Kennedy)

Bait (Book of Extraordinary Femme Fatale Stories, ed. Maxim Jakubowski)

Mummy Calls (Classic Monsters Unleashed, ed. James Aquilone)

Work published on Patreon:

Short fiction:

This Life, This Death

The Night of the Dog-Headed Man

The Death of Norma Lake (fragment from early draft of Bonewalker)

Low Over Water

The One You Feed

Adaptive Evolution In The Lancashire Grindylow: A Report By Alexandra Thraves Ph.D

The Bactrian

Verse:

Submariner

Beacon 46-A

The Christmas Kiss

In addition, my story 'Redwater,' from The Alchemy Press Book Of Horrors 3: A Miscellany Of Monsters, was reprinted in Ellen Datlow's The Best Horror Of The Year #14, making three years in a row that my work's appeared there.

Thank you to all the editors who've published me this year, to Anne and Meg, to Gemma for her support on the podcast, and to all readers and listeners who've supported my work by reading or listening to it.

Finally, and most of all, to my lovely wife, Cate, without whom none of this would have been possible.

Happy New Year, everybody.

Good luck for 2023.

Simon x

 

Things Of The Past Few Weeks

It's been... eventful since I last blogged. Not all of it is stuff I can talk about publicly right now, and not all of it's good. Things should be okay in the long run, but there have been some tough times.

However, there've also been some good things, so I wanted to talk about those here.

First of all, there've been more reviews for A Different Kind Of Light, and they've been excellent ones. At The Future Fire, Rachel Verkade says:

I loved this book. I read it in the space of a couple of hours because I literally could not put it down. The story is compelling and moves at a swift and natural pace, the characters are compelling, and the descriptions of the disaster are haunting. It is a thematic cousin to stories like Revival and Hell House, stories about our fascination with death and our questions about what lies beyond… and whether we really want those questions to be answered. 

While over on Horrified, Ally Wilkes describes the novella as:

A delightfully short and scary little book... makes for compulsive reading. I found myself extremely creeped out as the daylight slipped away and the shadows on the hallway stairs became more prominent.... genuinely dread-inducing.

Many thanks to both reviewers!

I've been focusing on short fiction over the past couple of months, and one of the markets I submitted to was Maxim Jakubowski's Book Of Femmes Fatales And Dangerous Women Stories. I didn't think I stood a chance, but was delighted to learn yesterday that my story 'Bait' has been chosen for the anthology - one of 18 stories out of 170 submissions, which is pretty cool! Also sharing the TOC are Eric Brown, Susi Holliday, Keith Brooke, Joseph S. Walker, Robert Lopresti, Michael A.Gonzales, Lavie Tidhar, Rhys Hughes, Ali Seay, Ashley Lister, Bernie Crosthwaite, Rose Biggin, O'Neil De Noux, Bev Vincent, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Claude Lalumiere and Ana Teresa Pereira.

Some of these are writers I've read or worked with before, while others are new to me, but I look forward to appearing in print with them.

So those are the latest developments. I'll try and blog again soon.

One last request before I go: if you've read my work and enjoyed it, please consider leaving a review (even a few words will do) or rating at Amazon for any works you've liked. The more reviews it gets, the more visible it becomes to other customers, and the wider an audience it reaches.