Review of the Year - 2019

I'm posting my Review of the Year a few days' early this year, because I'm also planning on posting a Review of the Decade before the year is out.

2019 will definitely go down in my memory as the Year of ACE Gamebooks. Three of them were published over the space of six months, which meant posting out roughly 600 rewards to those people who supported the Kickstarters that meant I could produce the books in the first place. As well as writing 'TWAS - The Krampus Night Before Christmas, editing Beowulf Beastslayer, and proofreading and publishing NEVERLAND - Here Be Monsters! I also started writing the next in the series, Dracula - Curse of the Vampire.

Not only that but I also ran another Kickstarter to publish 'TWAS - The Roleplaying Game Before Christmas, in time for next Christmas, which is the first title in the ACE Gamebooks Roleplay line!

Going back to ACE Gamebooks though, I have also sold the foreign language rights to a number of the titles in the series. Alice's Nightmare in Wonderland is now available in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Brazil, and will soon be available in Argentina, France, and Italy. The Wicked Wizard of Oz will be available in Germany and the Czech Republic in 2020, and there are other licensing deals in the works.

In terms of conventions, I visited the UK Games Expo (for which I wrote a short piece about the history of Joe Dever's Lone Wolf series), MantiCon in Germany in August, and Dragonmeet at the end of November. I also ran Fighting Fantasy Fest 3, which I am assured was the biggest and best to date.

In terms of short fiction, I had stories appear in the anthologies Kaiju Rising II (The Ghost in the Machine), Wonderland (The Hunting of the Jabberwock), and Scarlet Traces (Wonderful Things), while some of my short stories became available again with the reprints of old issues of Inferno! magazine. 2019 also saw the publication of my first short story for the Black Library in five years - Journey of the Magi, published in Inferno! Volume 4 - and I'm pleased to say there are more to come.

This year was also special because Dr Janina Ramirez provided a cover quote for Beowulf Beastslayer, and I started working with another well-known person on a book due to be published next year.

I appeared in my first audio drama, when the Fighting Fantasy Audio adventure Deathtrap Dungeon: The Last Champion was released in March, and in November I attempted NaNoWriMo once again, although I missed out on making the 50,000 word target by around 2,000 words.

I didn't manage to write another Scrooge and Marley (Deceased) story, even though I had hoped I would be able to make time to do so, but the BBC's recent adaptation starring Guy Pearce, and the BBC's adaptation of The War of the Worlds, showed me that there's still room for my interpretation of both these classic stories.

So what do I have planned for 2020? Mainly, finishing Dracula - Curse of the Mummy, but there are some other exciting projects on the horizon, and I will be attending the UK Games Expo again in the summer. And that, I think, is plenty to be getting on with for the time being.