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 :-)