The Spoons That Are My Ears!

I had twelve books published in 2022, averaging one a month. The most important of these by far is my Centipede Press collection, The Senile Pagodas, a book of tribute stories to authors I admire. It is starting to get some good reviews. I waited ten years for this collection to be published; the wait was worth it.

So much for print books... When it comes to ebooks, my most important publication of the year was The Rhys Hughes Fantastic MEGAPACK® published by Wildside Press, a showcase of my short stories from the past three decades. This is the first of three such volumes and taken together they will form a very good retrospective collection of my work.

I was translated into Serbian and published in Belgrade. Postmoderni Mornar was translated by Tereza Bojković and issued by Partizanska knjiga. This was a project supported by the Welsh Literature Exchange, who also funded my partner's university residency in Aberystwyth as part of the Charles Wallace Fellowship (but that's a different story).

I also sold several books including a fantasy adventure novel that I finished writing just before the pandemic struck. And another of my books has been chosen for translation (into German this time). I sold many short stories, even more poems, and a few articles.

I finished writing a novel, The Hippy Quixote, that I plan on sending to an agent very soon (I finally seem to have acquired a new agent, at least for this one book, and he's a very notable agent indeed). I wrote forty short stories, hundreds of flash fictions (500 in the case of this book) and countless poems, many of which were published, many of which haven't even yet been submitted anywhere.

I also started writing a surreal thriller, Average Assassins, that I hope to finish in the first half of next year. I have outlined most of rhe chapters already and written the first. Writing more novels is a resolution for the future. I have many planned. It's just a case of working through my list methodically. When Average Assassins is finished I will probably return to work on my fantasy novel Unevensong, which I haven't worked on for almost thirty years. And after that, it is high time I returned to my incomplete big novel, The Clown of the New Eternities, but realistically that one might have to wait until 2024.

Maybe the most significant aspect of this year in terms of my writing is that I finally wrote my 1000th story. This was a target I decided to aim for a long time ago, never expecting that I would achieve it, but in the summer it actually happened. My 1000th story is called 'Tangents' and is more of a novella (containing flash fictions) than a regular short story. It will hopefully be published in Brazil in 2023.

I had always said that when I reached my 1000th story I would give up writing short stories. The thousand stories taken together would form one immense story-cycle called PANDORA'S BLUFF and the last story in the cycle would feed into the first, forming an endless loop. Well, the loop exists now but I have gone beyond the thousand and my vision for the story-cycle has undergone a modification. The cycle will be as long as it turns out to be.

I began the year in Sri Lanka and I spent 2022 in that country, in India, Egypt, and Wales. I am now back in India and returning to Sri Lanka one week from now. I have travelled a great deal this year and seen many amazing things. I can say it's been one of the best years of my life.

Here's to 2023, and a great year to all of you out there!