2025 In Review

A look back

I urged a bunch of people associated with Rac Press to take their look back on this year and post them, so it feels a little disingenuous for me to not do the same. Even though I feel more than a little bit eclipsed by the scope of what they managed this year.

Everything started off with a short story for Cannon set in the same world as my upcoming novel, A Sense of Murder (aka “Blue As Sky”). That story, “Footprints in the Sand”, ended up in Cannon Fodder: Tales From the Gun Crew.

I also edited another story, “Paladins for Hire”, that will be appearing in an upcoming anthology. I really, really enjoyed this one. There’s a few short stories that have made me think, “I’d like to come back and visit these guys again.” Thorn and Rose are definitely in that category.

Yeah, “editing” was definitely my theme for the year. I handed off Sigils to Raconteur Press and A Sense of Murder (aka “Blue As Sky”) to Cannon Publishing. That has ended up getting moved over to Selene Press, where it will be one of their first novels.

Even though I did my best to make sure both novels were ready to go, both novels obviously ended up needed some editing. Especially since Sigils got broken up into two parts. So I spent more than a few weeks working on that.

A lot of my editing for A Sense of Murder happened during a September writer’s retreat in New Mexico with Dave Butler, Marc Stallings, and a bunch of other awesome fellows. That was, oh, maybe 40 hours of straight-up editing I did that week. The book ended up much stronger for all that, but man, it was rough.

In October, Convoy of Chaos came out from Three Ravens Publishing. That Car Wars anthology included my story, “Milk Run”. I’m really pleased that it made it in there. This was my first chance at writing in someone else’s IP, and I’m happy I was able to create something Steve Jackson could approve of.

Around this time is when I started doing some serious outlining on the sequel to Sigils. Remember when I said Sigils got broken up into two parts? That was originally intended to be the first book of a trilogy (Sigils, Glyphs, and Runes). Well, I’m in a strange situation now where I know the ending of the second book, but I need to shift some elements from the third forward to make the story work. Yeah, writer problems. It’s odd for me because I am more of a discovery writer, so having to dig in and outline everything beforehand is kind of scary.

In the middle of all athat, at the end of the year, I was the guest editor for Pinup Noir: High Class Muscle, the sixth (yes, sixth!) volume in Rac Press’ “Pinup Noir” series. With close to 70 submissions, that was a LOT of reading. A lot of GOOD reading. Picking out ten stories from all those was hard. I ended up reading most of those twice, and some of them three times, trying to get a feel for what all went together.

Somewhere along in there, I managed to put together a proposal for another story in someone else’s IP; sketch out 14 short story or novel ideas; and send off an older favorite of mine as an entry to a writing contest.

Oh, and I got to enjoy the smell of chloroform as I was abduct—er, invited to join the Rac Press crew. I’ve been helping them with PR/marketing, which has been tremendous fun. I’ve helped to publicized nine novels, nine boys books, and eight anthologies in that time. We’ve also racked up over 130 pieces of earned media in the second half of the year. Not a bad start.

Anyways, that’s my year in review. Now that I look at it, I’m surprised at how much I got done, and how much I forgot about.