Well. I'm glad to see the back of those twelve months, how about you?

I don't do awards eligibility posts anyway, but even if I did 2020 was basically a pause year for my writing for multiple real life reasons, of which a once-in-a-century global pandemic was only one. In all honesty I've hardly written anything new for going on two years now. Which is to say: about the amount of time we've been fighting our local education authority to get an appropriate school placement for our youngest child and his autistic needs. Funny how dealing with the bureaucracy required to secure your child's entire future and current happiness leaves you without the time or emotional energy to write.

But some stuff still happened this year! To wit:

This is an awards post. This is not an awards post.

I've been putting this off for ages (I'm what, two months past everyone else?) because I don't know how to write it. But maybe I just need to write it and accept that it will be as messy and tangled as my thoughts on the subject.

Here is the lede unburied: I am not putting myself forward for awards consideration any more.

Though I'm not going to decline nominations, or be displeased in the slightest, or stop rounding up what I achieved in a year.

Messy and tangled.

It's August, and I've made zero new posts so far this year. Ouch.

In my defence, it has been a year. As was 2018. As was 2017. Hmm. But it'll let up at some point, right?

Right?

Herewith, then, a few overdue updates collected together as briefly as I can manage (he says, laughing)

(Updated 3rd January 2019, because one last story snuck into the year right at the death.)

Good grief, how is it that time again already?

In brief--and I really can keep it brief this year--my best story this year (IMHO) is The Bone Poet & God, which is still only available in the Sword & Sonnet anthology, so you can only read it if you buy that. Which you should! But let's be honest: a story still exclusive to an anthology is not a story with much chance in a world filled with more free online stuff than any one person can read. So it goes.

For clarity, I'm also no longer eligible for the Campbell. Many excellent people are, but I, alas, am now too grizzled and embittered a veteran to be considered a newcomer.

But there's always some introspection to be done too, isn't there? Circumstance means this post will form something of a counterpart to last year's post, moreso than you'd expect from simply being a post of a similar nature. We'll do stories first, waffling after.

It is an all-too-rare delight to write something with a specific aim in mind and have that pan out. To sell something where you hoped to sell it. To be involved in a project you desperately want to be a part of. And, more than that, to have the story come out the way you'd hoped it would, when it was just a shining, nebulous dream in your head, a shifting canvas of possible scenes and emotional moments.

Because most of the time when I actually sit down to write, that floating cloud of possibility resplendent with golden sunlight and soaring birds collapses into a dreary grey raincloud low overhead. A Tuesday sort of cloud. There's something particularly banal and dull about Tuesdays, even more so than Mondays. By the time you get to Tuesday you can't even muster the energy to hate it. That sort of cloud. Anyway.

"Write what you know," they say. Easier said than done with sci-fi & fantasy though, innit? I've never actually worked in a magic cotton factory or cut a barbarian's knob off or run experiments on a Jovian moonbase.

But I have brewed wine--lots and lots of wine--and now I've written a story about brewing wine, too! (When I say now, I mean it was published three months ago. I am not very good at timely blog posts.) And whilst I can't guarantee the magical effects of the recipes in that story (though you never know), I can guarantee that all the recipes are real recipes, describing a real method, and would get you real wine at the end of the day. Probably real drunk, too.

The story doesn't make the recipes particularly readable, though, and some of the quantities are a bit off (my fault, sorry), so here's a proper breakdown of the four recipes. And don't worry: unlike the story, you can just use tap water.