The four-day weekend is over and I’m back to the “real world” for the next few days. We cooked a lot of great meals (our first attempt at beignets worked out well, although we discovered they don’t reheat very well), drank some wine, listened to non-stop Christmas music, worked on a jigsaw puzzle, and relaxed.
On Christmas Eve, I received my contributor copy of the SST Publications edition of Shining in the Dark, the anthology containing my short story “Aeliana.” This is one of two very-well-published stories from 2018. Although I haven’t seen every edition yet–and some won’t be out until 2019–the anthology has been published in English (US & UK editions), Bulgarian, Italian, Czech, German, Swedish, Serbian and will appear in audio next year as well.
The other “well-published” story, of course, is “Zombies on a Plane,” which appeared in Flight or Fright, the anthology I co-edited with Stephen King. The story–and the anthology–has also been published in English (US &UK editions), on audio, and a dozen translations are in the works.
My only other short story to appear in 2018 was “Ray and the Martian” in Fantastic Tales of Terror from Crystal Lake Publishing. Several stories were slated to appear this year, but it looks like they’ve all been pushed into 2019, which is fine. There’s no rush. Things happen when they happen. Earlier this week, I received am acceptance for a story that will appear in a 2020 anthology. The funny thing about this particular story is that I wrote it in 2003. According to my records, I only submitted it twice, both times in 2003 and never again thereafter until I decided to give it a look as a candidate for the anthology. Turns out, I liked it quite a bit. Gave it an update and tweaked it a little, and now it will be published nearly two decades later. That’s cool.
In addition to fiction, I had my usual run of non-fiction pieces come out in 2018. The coolest was “The Dead Zone,” written for the Poetry Foundation. I received a lot of feedback for that one. I contributed an essay to
Stephen King American Master and another to It’s Alive: Bringing Your Nightmares to Life. Several articles and reviews at News from the Dead Zone, too. I’m hoping we’ll get Stephen King Revisited up and running again in 2019. Right Rich?
On the reading front, I averaged nearly a book a week throughout the year. The final tally was 48 books begun in 2018, although I’m still reading four of them. You can find the complete list here. In no particular order, here are the top ten:
- How It Happened by Michael Koryta
- The Outsider by Stephen King
- I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara
- Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
- Give Me Your Hand by Megan Abbott
- Bonfire by Krysten Ritter
- The Man Who Came Uptown by George Pelecanos
- Transcription by Kate Atkinson
- In a House of Lies by Ian Rankin
- Becoming by Michelle Obama
