Skip to main content

2016 Writing Accomplishments and 2017 Goals


Glowing 2017 logo on a digital grid that stretches into the horizon line.
Credit: Pixabay.com


Somewhere between Christmas Day and the New Year’s Day, I get that dark feeling as if nothing will be on the other side of the threshold between the old year and the new. It’s almost as if all hell will break loose once we step through that threshold. In fact, this concern caused me to write a short story the day after Christmas for my writers’ critique group’s holiday party, a kind of time travel story you can say. I’ve only written the rough draft though, and because it’s holiday themed, particularly New Year’s, you probably won’t see it until the end of the year. But even though for some of us the other side of the portal to 2017 maybe seemed like a black nothingness, here we are; we are alive and that’s all that counts.

I thought I would look at my writing accomplishments from last year and my goals (or resolutions) for this new year of 2017. But first let me talk about how Christmas went. It went by great. Nothing that spectacularly different from other years, just spent it with the family. However, one of my gifts was my first card game since the last 5-plus years. It’s called Arkham Horror (not to be mistaken with the board game of the same name), a game that lives up to its name: it’s a damn horror trying to figure out how to play it. But it’s still fun and because it’s so complicated it’s intellectually challenging, and, perhaps best of all, it’s based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Elder Mythos. So during the first week of the new year I had the card game laid out on my kitchen table trying to learn the game as I went but it takes me longer since I work a day job and, of course, I work my freelance writing.

Games with storylines such as Arkham Horror are a lot like writing as well as acting since they’re role playing games (RPGs). You make choices as one of the characters and that influences the game’s story. Kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure book which I can’t believe I used to read those thinking of myself as literarily sophisticated, but hey, it’s what started many of us on avid reading and even as writers of fiction and so reading them is still a great way to introduce young people to reading fiction and, better yet, writing it. I did a blog post with a link to an article about gaming and writing fiction. If you haven’t seen it, I suggest you check it out; it’s really insightful. 

Well, here are . . .

2016’s Accomplishments:



  • Making an attempt to write a novel: So far it’s entitled Invasion of the Avatars, which I’m currently writing.




And . . .

Goals for 2017:

  • Submit short fiction to magazines and anthologies: I’m going to return to doing this and put self-publishing on a small hiatus.Set up a table for my books at a con or two.

  • Relaunch The Super Freek: I had put it on hiatus not long after launching it, but since my hours at my day job will be changing soon and I have a lot of blogging plans that won’t fit the agenda here at the Fantastic Site I’m going to start posting at The Super Freek again. I don’t know exactly when yet, but I’ll definitely let you know.

  • Give a new look to The Fantastic Site: It’s been at least two years since the last re-designing.

  • Start posting at The Fantastic Site by Saturday of each week again: I’ve been spilling into Mondays too much as you may have noticed, and that includes this evening. My apologies.



The following have already been in the plan and are more short term, so I really can’t call them resolutions like the above: I’m going to publish the print version of “Circa Sixty Years” and the photorealistic cover for both print version and e version.



So what are your accomplishments from last year and/or goals or resolutions for this new year? Did you get any interesting holiday gifts?


Happy New Year! And Until next time . . . 

Comments

  1. Ooh, Arkham Horror is a card game too? I'd love to try it. The board game is equally difficult in figuring out play. I read those Choose Your Own Adventure books too. Loved them! Good luck with your goals this year! :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Christine. Sorry for responding so late; my day job's kept me from my blog most of the week. But yeah, the card game just came out last year (2016). I'm just now understanding how to play a little better at my second attempt. I have to play it in segments though because I don't have time to play in one sitting. Thanks for commenting! :)

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book-To-Movie: ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’

Credit: Wikimedia Commons I apologise for posting outside our regular post-day which is late Saturday night/early Sunday morning. However, I got behind on several things last week and so had to postpone the post to today.  I’ve been a reader of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books ever since I was 11. What I’ve always liked so much about the series is that, like a good horror story, the stories often take place in dark settings and involve bizarre cases. Conan Doyle’s novel, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, definitely contains these elements. It’s a detective story that crosses over into the gothic horror genre. Several movie adaptations of the novel have been made that go as far back as a 1915 German silent film. In 1959 Hammer Studios released a version starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. As much as I’m a fan of the Hammer horror films, I have not seen that one yet. The only one that I’ve seen so far is the 1939 adaptation starring that other big name in classic Bri

Book-To-Movie: ‘I Am Legend’

A vampire similar to the ones in 2008's "I Am Legend" which starred Will Smith. Credit: Pixabay.com It’s time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie, I review a book and its movie adaptations. This month’s book and its movies based on it is I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. While vampires were no longer in in the American pop culture of the the 1950s, science fiction horror in general was. So Matheson’s I Am Legend brought the scientificising of vampires into the pulp literary scene of that era. Not too long after, in the early ‘60s, the first of three book-to-movie adaptions appeared and was renamed The Last Man On Earth which starred Vincent Price. The other two were The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston in the ‘70s and I Am Legend starring Will Smith in the 2001s. Even though each one debunked the myth of the vampire as a supernatural being, each had its own depiction of the creature. ‘I Am Legend’, The Book Set in a near post-apocalyptic fu

Book-To-Movie: Stephen King’s 'The Raft'

Credit: Pixabay.com It's the third Saturday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie ! In a Book-To-Movie we review a book and its movie adaptation. One of the reasons I as a horror fan don’t read a lot of Stephen King’s work is because most of it consists of novels that go more than 400 pages. I have a short attention span when it comes to reading, ironically since I consider myself an avid reader, and so I normally won’t read a work that is much more than the equivalent to a 350-page mass market paperback. The other reason why I don’t read a lot of King’s work is that, as literary scholars will tell you, a lot of his writing is poor. However, he does have some good writing in his works, especially his earlier stuff, including his short horror tales. So if I read anything by Stephen King it’s usually his short stories or novellas. One of his collections I’ve read is Skeleton Crew which includes some of his good, or at least better, fi