I don’t really use this website blog much – you’ll mainly find me at Bluesky these days for day-to-day stuff, now Twitter’s gone down the toilet – but I do try to remember to update it every now and then. Sadly, it seems I didn’t manage to cover my fairly last-minute decision to go to WorldCon in Glasgow (a lot of fun! And I didn’t even catch Covid!), and also FantasyCon’s return to Chester in October (also a lot of fun! And I didn’t catch Covid then, either!).
Anyway, 2024 was a good year overall, with Da Big Dakka and Lelith Hesperax coming out, and three fun conventions. My band also released some new music! However, we’ve sadly been seeing an apparently exponential rise in the usage of generative “AI” for both images and text, which is a nightmare for creatives as our work gets lost in an ever-increasing sea of slop. For authors, this may be the new real benefit of having an established publisher, since that can be some sort of guarantee to the reader that your work actually came from a human brain rather than being something soulless and recycled. I don’t know how self-published authors just starting out are supposed to make any headway when the consumer can’t be sure what it is they’re being asked to buy.
Which brings me to my next point: I’m almost certainly going to be having a go at self-publishing next year myself. Although my output for Games Workshop has remained steady, I’ve not had a novel out of “my own” since 2022, and since even if a publisher offered me a contract today the book probably wouldn’t come out until 2026, that doesn’t sit well with me. I left my former literary agency because it wasn’t a great fit (after I’d been passed on to them when my original agent left agenting), but even though I do know some editors in person now, having an agent definitely greases the wheels for this sort of thing. I have one manuscript out on submission, and another I’m working on at the moment. At least one of those, I suspect, will end up coming out next year, simply because I want to release another novel. With any luck, the benefits of having some sort of existing audience will help me rise above the slop and get noticed?
In other news for next year, I’ve bought my tickets to EasterCon in Belfast, and to World Fantasycon in Brighton. However, before either of those is this rather wonderful little event in February:
I’m really looking forward to this: it should be great fun, and I hope to see some of you there 🙂
If I don’t update this again before next year (which based on my form, is fairly doubtful) then I hope everyone has a very pleasant festive season, whatever that means for you.