'The road ahead was empty as far as he could see' - Daniel Easterman, The Final Judgement.
At the end of the day, of course, 31st December is just another day, but it's only natural to look back over the year. It's been a grim one on the global scale, with the War in Ukraine dragging on and now the horror-show in Gaza, plus the deaths of many good and gifted people - Tina Turner, Joss Ackland, David Leland, Andre Braugher, Tom Wilkinson, John Pilger, David Drake, Ian Gibson, Benjamin Zephaniah and so many others.
But it's also only natural to take stock of what you've managed to accomplish personally. And so cue long self-indulgent post....
The author Aliya Whiteley coined the phrase 'The Year of the Duck in the Mist' to describe years like 2023. In other words, a year in which, on the surface, very little seems to be happening, while a ton of stuff is going on under it.
I completed two novels in 2023. One of these was The Sound of the Dark, which will be published in 2025 as the second in my two-book deal with Angry Robot. The other was a thriller. I've written a couple of those now, and am ironing out the bugs in them, ready to send them along to my agent.
The Ravening, the the first in the two-book deal, was written last year. Structural edits have now been completed to the publisher's satisfaction, and The Ravening should now see print in November 2024, two years since The Hollows was published.
The Hollows has now been out for just over a year, and has gone to a second printing, been released as an audiobook and shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award. It's earned out its advance and is now being translated into Russian.
I am grateful beyond words to Anne C. Perry and Meg Davis of Ki Agency, Simon Spanton and Caroline Lambe and the rest of the Angry Robot team, and the countless vloggers, bloggers, reviewers and interviewers who helped spread the world.
I've also found myself taking stock at greater length, though. It's been four years since my previous agent quit to become a commissioning editor, leaving me in need of new representation. Since then I've written eight novels. The first of these attracted the attention of Anne at Ki Agency, who wanted to know what else I had. By then I'd completed the first draft of the second of those novels and had begun work on a third. I told her about both of these, and she was immediately interested in the third, which eventually became The Hollows.
The fourth novel was a supernatural thriller set in 1997 Manchester - a good book, but not quite the right follow-up to The Hollows. One day, hopefully, the time for it will be right. After that there were a number of false starts, but finally novel number five took shape, and that became The Ravening. It wasn't an easy birth, but I think it was worthwhile. I hope you will too. By then, Anne - one of the loveliest, smartest and most supportive people I've ever worked with - had, like my previous agent, changed careers to become a commissioning editor, but not before putting me in the capable hands of Ki's founder, Meg Davis, who's been equally terrific to work with.
I usually try and have at least the opening chapters of the next book started by the time I've finished a project, but none of the ideas I had when The Ravening was finished worked so I asked Mrs Church for a random word to use as a prompt. She obliged, and that became novel number six. A flat-out thriller, this time, although for the poor devil of a narrator it was probably indistinguishable from a horror story...
Number seven was another thriller, starting from a fairly simple situation: in all honesty I suspected it would only turn out to be a novella, but the two main characters both proved resourceful enough to keep things going a lot further than I'd expected. There's still a lot of work to do on that, but hopefully it'll be worthwhile.
And then there was novel number eight, The Sound of the Dark. That was completed in November, and now the beta readers are having their say. Hopefully the rewrites on that will be done in the first months of the New Year.
Currently I'm at work on another thriller. Some books are hard to get right; others just seem to pour out. So far, this has been the second kind. It started in mid-November and, as of today, the word count stands at 56,181.
So, of those eight books, one has been published so far, with two more due to come out. Three are currently filed away, and may or may not appear in the future. Leaving two thrillers, and a third on the way. All of which may or may not come to anything. A writing career is a marathon and not a sprint: all you can do is keep your head down, do what you love, and make it the best you can. It's the only part of the whole process that you can control.
I don't know what will happen to those books, and I've no idea if the people who loved The Hollows will feel the same about The Ravening, but in 2024 we'll hopefully find out.
I look forward to seeing you all there.
Wishing everyone a safe and happy new year.
And I'll see you in 2024.
Daniel