The Spoons That Are My Ears!

Egocentricity is going places!

Another year is almost over. 2009 was my most productive writing year ever. In fact I regard it as my Annus Scribblus. I attained several long-standing goals: I wrote my 500th story (in fact I'm now on number 512); I broke the 200,000 words barrier for a single year; and I passed the two million words mark for total fiction written in my career. In essence, my annual output doubled. All this was a good way to celebrate the fact that exactly twenty years have passed since my earliest surviving story. I have been a writer for two full decades!

In the past twelve months I wrote a novel, a novella, four novelettes and plenty of short stories, 45 in total. Coincidentally, that's the same number of stories that appear in Donald Barthelme's recent (posthumous) collection, Flying to America, a book that ended up being one of the volumes I most enjoyed reading in 2009. Returning to Barthelme was almost as big a revelation as discovering him for the first time, in my long-lost youth. What a genius, what an ironist, what a philosopher! For the complete list of my other favourite reads of the year follow this link.


I believe I created some of my best work this year, stories such as 'Southbound Satin' and 'The Impossible Inferno', both of which will appear in my forthcoming Ex Occidente collection in 2010, a volume that contains most of my finest fiction from the past ten years. I also finally finished my grand linked collection of fantastical pub tales, Tallest Stories, and another collection, the slightly more restrained Mirrors in the Deluge.

As for my publications: my novel, Mister Gum, was published last September; and two new chapbooks, Madonna Park and Plutonian Parodies, appeared shortly afterwards. Various stories found homes in various anthologies and magazines. All very nice! But what about non-literary activities? Ah, that's where 2009 comes unstuck...

This was an incredibly static year for me. Apart from writing and reading, I actually did very little. Outdoor activities suffered the most. To be fair, the abysmal Welsh weather didn't help matters: in the entire summer I only managed two bivouacking adventures, and although I did manage to get back into running and completed a 5K charity race, I didn't keep up my regime, with the result that I lapsed back into unfitness, the state I'm currently in.

Next year will be different... I don't intend to stop writing, or even take a proper break (I have to finish another novel and write at least two novellas) but the pressure will be less: the headlong rush to the halfway point is over. Writing as the only significant activity in my life is a strategy I don't intend to repeat! I must travel again in 2010; indeed I am planning a trip to Romania that will include Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania, Macedonia and Greece. So it only remains for me to wish you all:

Happy New Year!