Goodbye to 2012, which was a pretty good year, and hello to 2013, which already has one thing going for it: it’s the first year since 1987 where all four digits are unique.
On the reading front, I started 76 books. If you’re interested in all the gory details, you can find the list here. I’m still working on two of them, so they’ll also be the first books of 2013. I reviewed over thirty of them for Onyx Reviews. I also wrote reviews for a couple of other markets (Cemetery Dance and Dead Reckonings). Cemetery Dance collected all of my reviews of Stephen King works published since 2000 into a nifty little signed chapbook called Twentieth Century King, which is available at their website. I also worked with Brian Freeman to revise and expand The Stephen King Illustrated Trivia Book, which will be out early this year.
I spent the first quarter of 2012 working on The Dark Tower Companion, which will be published by NAL on April 2, just three short months from now. Large parts of the rest of the year were spent working on the copy-edited manuscript and, these past two weeks, on the page proofs.
It hasn’t been a banner year for short story publications. I had a chapter in The Crane House round robin novella from CD. My story “The Case of the Tell-tale Black Cat of Amontillado (with Zombies and an Ourang-Outang)” appeared in The Spirit of Poe from Literary Landmark Press, though the book was fraught with delays and issues. “Sitting Up with the Dead” was in Appalachian Undead, but that book, too, had behind-the-scenes issues and has been declared out of print, though, like any good zombie, it will arise and lurch forward once again in a different form. I already have a few stories in the queue for 2013 publication, though, several more in submission to various markets, and hope to slip a few more in as well, including one I hope to write in the next week or two.
This was a good year for reprints. “Therapy,” my award-winning story from 2006 was reprinted in Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper. “In a Country Churchyard” (2008) was reprinted in Tales to Terrify, Volume 1 and “Silvery Moon “(2010) was recorded for the Tales to Terrify podcast.
I published four essays at FEARnet and had another four News from the Dead Zone essays in the print issue of Cemetery Dance, the most since 2004. That’s in addition to six lengthy updates to the online version. I had one essay in Screem (I had to skip an issue because of my work on The Dark Tower Companion), two short pieces in the 2012 Stephen King Library Desk Calendar and a bunch of snippets in Graphic Horror: Movie Monster Memories. I haven’t missed a monthly contribution to Storytellers Unplugged since we launched in July 2006.
My plan is for 2013 to be the year of the novel, so I probably won’t be writing as many short stories. We’ll see. The best laid plans of mice and writers.
