Goodbye 2017, hello 2018

After a gap of a week from writing this blog, due to the 'flu from hell, today I'm going to write the post I planned for last week.  As is traditional at the end of the year, I want to review the year's achievements and goals.  Summing it up, I'd say it was a mixed bag,

February saw me on writing retreat with two friends, ploughing through another rewrite of Snowbird, a twenty-plus years old manuscript.  It still wasn't working, and a few weeks after the retreat I decided to abandon it.  I love Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, and that gave me a clue to where to go next.  She starts slap bang in the action, with the crew of the starship just going about their daily business.  So what if I started with the second book in my series, Combined Cognition, and did the same?  I also thought that book might appeal to her readers.  I trusted my writer's instincts, and they turned out to be right.

In June I and the two other members of Pentangle Press presented a self publishing talk at Winchester Writer's Conference.  It was a coup to get into this prestigious local Fesrival, and meant that I could listen to John Berlyne of Zeno Agency talk about what SF publishers wanted.  The stand-out piece of advice was not to be too original.  Since I'd always considered one of my novels too derivative, this was an interesting take.

The big trip of the year for me was to Helsinki, for the World Science Fiction Convention.  I got myself on a panel to talk about books with Lee Harris, senior editor of Tor.com, and Marcus Gipps, Commissioning Editor of Gollancz UK.  Helsinki was lovely, the weather 23 degrees and sunny throughout my stay,  I had a great time, and learned a lot about writing too,

Back in England, October saw me making the first submission round for Combined Cognition.  I received a request for the full manuscript within two days of submitting it to one agent.  In November the Portsmouth Writers' Hub hosted a Dragon's Den pitching night.  I pitched to two agents, and got invites to submit to them both.

So at the end of the year I have a novel under serious consideration. But what about the short story targets I set?  They've been abandoned, but that's a whole other story.  A story for next week.