Still Not Big on Pants: My Writing Year in Review

Well, it’s December 12th, so 2018 is rapidly dwindling away. Which is alarming, because my last memory is promising myself that the Summer of 2018 was going to be epic while pouring myself a shot of whiskey, and now here I am, yellowed and somewhat confused.

Writing continues to be my life, so it makes sense that I judge the success or failure of any given year by how my writing is going both artistically and commercially. And 2018 was a pretty good year, all things considered.
In January, my short story Arthur Kill published in Mystery Weekly magazine. In May, Writing Without Rules was published by Writer’s Digest Books. In October, my short story Supply and Demand appeared in the anthology No Bars and a Dead Battery. And just last week my short story Rolls Upon Prank published in the newest Mystery Weekly. Plus, I sold another short story that I can’t officially announce yet, which I’m pretty psyched about.

So far I’ve written 19 shorts stories this year, and I’ll have #20 done by December 31st if it kills me. I also completed 2 new novels. We won’t get into the novels I started but couldn’t complete because of serious creativity failure, because no one wants to see a grown man cry.

I also continued to write for the Barnes and Noble Book Blog (ranking the SF books that won both the Hugo and Nebula and the one about anti-novels were two of my favorites that did pretty well) and Writer’s Digest. Making a living by writing about books and the craft of writing is almost as good as actually writing the books.

I got to attend BookCon and Book Expo America this year, I was a guest of some very cool podcasts, I got to teach a master class at a local university, I drank a lot of really good whiskey, and I still get to spend a lot of time not wearing any pants and no one can tell me not to, so I’m pretty psyched. How’d your 2018 go?