Happy New Year! Rolling out a whole decade and escorting in the New Roaring 20s! But hopefully without the Prohibition, gangsters, and stock market crash.
It’s been quite a decade for me, in retrospect. Most days, it’s really hard to see the forest for the trees. What’s really easy is to let our brains get in our own way. The turning of a decade is the perfect opportunity to reflect on the ups and downs of life and career.
So I’m going to take this opportunity to reflect on what I accomplished in the last ten years.
- Wrote and published six books under my own name: Rogues of the Black Fury, The Wild Boys, Sword of the Ronin, Spirit of the Ronin, Death Wind, and The Hammer Falls. Three more novels will be forthcoming in 2020.
- Launched a new YA pen name to reboot The Wild Boys under a new title, complete with a new sequel, and wrote a stand-alone magical realism novel due out in the Spring of 2020, Junk Magic and Guitar Dreams.
- Ghostwrote four books for clients, two novels and two memoirs.
- Got a Master of Arts in English.
- Launched a new comic book based on my Ronin Trilogy, Legend of the Ronin.
- Relaunched two of my early novels on Wattpad, The Ivory Star and Blood of the One.
- Returned to my freelance roots in the gaming industry, working on the Firefly Roleplaying Game (what a thrill this was!) and fiction for Battletech, one story of which was nominated for a Scribe Award this year.
- Edited an anthology of Lovecraftian short stories, Cthulhu Passant.
- Started writing screenplays and shopping them around, submitting them to various film festivals and contests. They’ve brought home three trophies so far, but as yet no option or production deals. I have learned a tremendous amount about filmmaking and how the film industry works, but there’s still a long way to go. Here’s a meme that I think is applicable here:
- Wrote and published over thirty short stories and novellas in various magazines and anthologies.
- Joined the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and Horror Writers of America (HWA), two life-long goals.
- Met and got to know several of my writing idols, some of whom I can now call friends and mentors.
- Met a lovely, amazing lady and talked her into marrying me.
- Moved overseas again, to New Zealand this time, and back again.
- Sat on panels at some of the biggest, most prestigious conventions in the speculative fiction/pop culture realm, including Denver Pop Culture Con, DragonCon, World Science Fiction Convention, World Horror, and World Fantasy.
- Redesigned and relaunched a website for each of my author names.
- Learned to play blues guitar (badly, see above meme).
- Took up martial arts again in a fairly serious way, earning belts in Japanese jujitsu, krav maga, and ninjutsu.
- Went bionic with a full knee replacement. My super power is that I can no longer walk through a metal detector.
- Thankfully avoided the kind of life-threatening illnesses that have claimed friends and colleagues.
Throw all this together at once, it looks like a lot. It is a lot, even though most of the time it felt like everything was moving at a snail’s pace.
But this writing gig is a marathon, not a sprint, as they say, and I fully intend to be creating until I’m a hundred.
May you accomplish everything you dream of in the coming decade. Set goals that will be the signposts toward your dreams.