Mostly I use this blog to share information with other people who may be interested, but another use of something like this is as a sort of diary, so I can look back later and see what I did and when.

Last night I hit a milestone, finishing the first draft of a novel that I first started writing about two years ago. That reminded me it might be a good time to summarize where everything stands with regard to my writing and publishing.

Obviously 2020 has been an absolutely crazy year. It’s been hard to feel like this is what life is supposed to be like, but then we simply have to deal with the circumstances in which we find ourselves, right? The COVID pandemic and the unusually loony and contentious political scene have at times made it difficult to do the things I would normally do. I know I’m not the only writer who has wondered how one could possibly concentrate on telling stories at a time like this. Others have had trouble reading for enjoyment.

While for part of the year, I’ve felt detached from my usual enjoyment of both reading and writing, at other times I’ve been more engaged than ever. There finally exists some hope that the most difficult aspects of 2020 will soon be alleviated.

First, as for publishing, my main published work of this year was Armageddon House, the novella published by Undertow Publications in May. There was a beautiful limited hardcover edition, which quickly sold out, and a trade paperback and ebook which remain available.

Also, a Polish translation appeared recently from Wydawnictwo IX, the first time my work has been published in translation anywhere.

To see more about Armageddon House, you can find all posts on this blog with the Armageddon House tag here:

https://griffinwords.com/tag/armageddon-house/



The only other work that I believe will appear in 2020 is my story “I Wake Up and Remember Myself” which will appear in Vastarien, volume 3, issue 2, a great, big double issue of what is always a reliably interesting periodical, and which this time contains work from many great writers. That issue of Vastarien can be preordered here:

https://grimscribepress.com/issues/

As for writing, in September, I finished a long novelette that is out on submission. I’ll say a lot more about it once it has found a publisher. This was the only project I both started and finished in 2020, taking much of the summer.

So mostly, I started and ended the year writing the first draft of the novel I mentioned earlier. When I hit a point when I didn’t feel like writing new words, I went back to the beginning of the novel and started re-writing from the beginning through about the 1/3 mark, which means that even though I just hit the end of the first draft, much of the novel has been polished a bit, and the rewrite process won’t be quite as long as if I needed to start from the beginning.

In other projects, though it’s not exactly what most people think of as “writing,” I did take brief time-outs during the year to plot and outline a couple of other novels, and I’ve arrived at which one of these I’ll begin writing next year when I get to a good place with the current edits.

That’s all I have to report for now. I’ve been reading a lot, and have encountered some really great books in the past few months, so maybe I’ll write something about those soon.