The Spoons That Are My Ears!

And 2023 turned out to be my most productive writing year ever. To make sure of this, I put all the fiction I wrote this year into a single document and did a wordcount. 344,919 words in total. This is so far ahead of my yearly average that I am genuinely surprised.

But maybe I shouldn't be. I have been lucky enough this year to work as a full-time writer. It's not a situation that is likely to happen again. My wordage was increased by the fact I wrote two novels:

* Growl at the Moon (a Weird Western; accepted for publication next year).

* The Devil's Halo (a supernatural adventure-comedy, currently being considered by a publisher). 

 And I also wrote two novellas:

* The Sunset Suite (another Weird Western; currently being considered by a publisher).

* The Trojan Panda (a work I plan to include in a collection of novellas that I will submit once I have finished writing all the other pieces for it).

Apart from those four lengthy works, I wrote 54 short-stories ranging in length from flash fictions to novelettes. Among the stories I am most proud of are 'The Soul Garden' (published in Nightmare Abbey #4), 'Ghosts on the Road' (published in The Horror Zine Fall 2023), 'Dynamiting the Honeybun' (published in There's No Way to Escape, a Boris Vian tribute anthology issued by Raphus Press), and three tales that haven't yet been published or accepted, 'Carpe Tedium', 'The Simian Flipflops' and 'Rip Van Winkle and Juliet'.

I had too many short-story publications in too many anthologies and magazines to list them all, but I will briefly mention that my J.G. Ballard tribute story 'The Go Players' (written last year) was published in Reports from the Deep End, issued by Titan Books; also my story 'The Wizard Killers' was published in the Fantastic Schools Staff anthology, part of a series of very nicely produced hardbacks.

As for my books... I had 14 published this year, but bear in mind that 11 of those were self-published, so if we are going to be strict about this, then I had three books published. They were:

* The Wistful Wanderings of Perceval Pitthelm (Telos Publishing).

* The Coffee Rubaiyat (Alien Buddha Press).

* Adventures with Immortality (Oddness; illustrated by Mike Dubisch).

I also had a chapbook published by Mount Abraxas Press, The Graphologist and Other Stories, and I mention this because chapbooks from that publisher always look very stylish.

Among my self-published books, five were poetry and three were fairy tales; but in fact those three volumes of fairy tales can be regarded as one work: Starfish Wish was a slim sampler for My Big Glib Book of Flippant Fairy Tales, a very large work that was too big to be bound by the printer; I broke off part of it and published that part separately as My Little Glib Book of Flippant Fairy Tales.

As for reading: I read a total of 48 volumes in 2023, though three of those volumes (the Henry Green omnibuses) contain three novels each. Some of the stuff I read this year was time wasted, but it is impossible to know before we have read a book whether it is a waste of time or not. That's the price a reader must be prepared to pay. The main thing is that the good work I read was truly outstanding and can be listed as follows:

* The Cyberiad - Stanislaw Lem.

* The Complete Enderby - Anthony Burgess.

* Sixty Stories - Donald Barthelme.

* Caught / Back / Concluding - Henry Green.

* Loving / Living / Party Going - Henry Green.

* Despair - Vladimir Nabokov.

* The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear - Walter Moers.

* The Bald Soprano and Other Plays - Eugene Ionesco.

* 1982, Janine - Alasdair Gray.

* The Narrow Corner - W. Somerset Maugham.

* Pigs Have Wings - P.G. Wodehouse.

* Voss - Patrick White. 

 As for my personal life: well, I no longer tend to talk much about that in public. I spent the year in India but enjoyed two visits to Sri Lanka. I climbed Sri Pada and it was nice to get back into mountain climbing. I was a guest of honour at the Goa Literary Festival (a relief to be invited somewhere to speak). I got married. I began playing badminton regularly... I am looking forward to 2024 and that's all :-)

This is my last book of 2023. I believe that this has been my most productive writing year ever, but I need to double check that claim.

My next blog post will be the last of the year and it will be a summation of a year that turned out to be really quite remarkable...

If the project is successful, there will be other anthologies along similar lines, for example QUADRUPLE OBSCURA featuring four writers, each contributing 15,000 words of fiction. And then QUINTUPLE OBSCURA featuring featuring five writers, each contributing 12,000 words of fiction. And then SEXTUPLE OBSCURA featuring six writers, each contributing 10,000 words of fiction, and so on, with the total wordage of each book being no more than 60,000 words.

Who knows where it will all end? Feasibly with 60,000 different writers each contributing one word of fiction. But that's very unlikely.

But anyway, I have drifted off the point, which is that the first issue of TRIPLE OBSCURA is now available for purchase. The featured writers are Jason Rolfe, Boris Glikman, and myself. No idea yet who will be in the second and third issues. The book is available from Amazon and elsewhere...