This happens every year at this time – you look back at the year just ended, remember the good bits and try to forget the bad bits; you look ahead to the year just begun, and try to convince yourself it will be better than even last year’s best bits, or that you have any control over how it will turn out… Shit happens, the road to hell, etc, etc.

Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make an effort, of course. You may not, for example, be able to land yourself a book contract, no matter how wonderful your novel is, but if you don’t write the damn thing you stand even less chance. (Though debut novelists have been offered contracts before writing their novels.)

Likewise, the most reliable method of getting short fiction into print seems to be the Shotgun Method. Write as many stories as you can, submit them as many times as you can… Someone somewhere will usually buy them. Then you too can be ubiquitous, and subsequent sales will get easier.

In other words, Hard Work helps. But there are no guarantees. Certainly short cuts don’t always do the trick. There are stories of self-published authors selling phenomenally well, and subsequently being picked up by big publishing houses. They are in a very tiny minority. Most books published by anyone other than major publishing houses or long-established small presses are ignored. For instance, Rocket Science, published by Mutation Press, received plenty of positive reviews when it appeared back in April 2012. But it is also notably absent from lists of “best anthologies of the year”. I didn’t expect Adrift on the Sea of Rains to make it onto any lists – around 300 people, at a guess, have read it, and none of them were commentators with a large footprint within the genre. New small press… self-published… A not-unexpected result.

I worked quite hard during 2012 promoting those two books, but I suspect my message didn’t travel much beyond my own circle of friends, acquaintances and those I talk to within the genre. That’s as far as my “platform” reaches at present. It grew during 2012 – a little – but that sort of organic growth is too small and too slow to bounce my work to the next level. Because I made a tactical error in 2012: I spent so much time promoting Rocket Science and Adrift on the Sea of Rains, and writing The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself, that I didn’t write any short fiction. And I need to do that in order to get my name out there…

So that’s one resolution for 2013. (I suspect it may have also been a resolution for each of the past few years.) I will write more short stories in 2013, I will submit more short stories in 2013. I have a bunch sort of started but far from finished, and I’ll  focus initially on them. Unfortunately, my desire to not write the sort of science fiction currently appearing in genre mags and on genre websites may somewhat limit my chances of success. Take my current work in progress: I was hoping to have it done for 31 December 2012, the deadline for Eibonvale Press’s new railway-themed genre anthology, Rustblind and Silverbright. Have yet to actually finish it. And it’s going to be a hard one to sell. ‘The Incurable Irony of the Man Who Rode the Rocket Sled’ is barely science fiction, and barely has a plot. It’s sort of “magical realism with astronauts” (as my story ‘Faith’ was once described), except it has no astronauts in it.

I do have other stories to work on. Sorry, no exploding spaceships. No spaceships at all, in fact. I have two novellas I’d like to complete – one of them is an expanded version of ‘The Contributors’. There’s also book three of the Apollo Quartet, Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above; and possibly book four, All That Outer Space Allows. I have three novel ideas for which I need to write the first three chapters. I’d also like to see if I can do anything with my Nanowrimo effort from 2011.

And that’s just on the writing side. (You do realise, of course, that most of this will go undone, because… things.)

Oh, and I also experimented in 2012 with publishing a limited edition chapbook. It started out as a bit of a joke, but the twelve copies of Wunderwaffe I produced all sold. I then put it up on Kindle, where it has also sold (thought not in huge numbers). I’m planning to do something similar to another of my previously-published short stories, but I haven’t decided which one yet. I might do it to more than one…

On the reading side, I’ll be continuing to review books for SF Mistressworks. In the absence of other regular reviewers – I do have some irregular reviewers, however – I’ll have to read at least one suitable a book a week. That’s going to be a tough schedule to meet. I will need help. Please.

There’s also the TBR, which reached epic proportions several years ago. Over Christmas just gone, for example, I read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, and realised afterwards with some embarrassment that I’d bought the book in November 2010. That’s actually not too bad – it’s taken me ten years to read some of the books I own. And that’s despite reading 153 books during 2012 – twelve down on the previous year’s total; in fact, the number has been steadily dropping since 2008. I suspect the number of books I’ve bought each year, however, has been steadily rising…

So, in 2013, I want to read more sf by women writers, more Malcolm Lowry, more Paul Scott, more recent genre books that interest me, more literary fiction… more good books. I also want to read much more genre short fiction. That’s going to be another resolution – to read genre short fiction regularly. But only if it interests me. I’ll happily bail on a story if it’s not working for me. But by the end of the year, I should at least be able to make some informed choices for the BSFA Award. I’ll also be including a top five of short fiction in my end of the year round-up post.

I’ll not bother with resolutions for films or music. Each year, I try to get to at least one gig a month. I don’t always make it, but by year’s end I’m usually not far off. For the record, it was 11 gigs in 2012, including Bloodstock. The best one should have been Anathema and Opeth in Leeds in November, but the venue was awful – over-packed and over-heated – and ruined the experience. Insomnium and Paradise Lost back in April might be the best, or perhaps it was local bands Setsudan and Northern Oak supporting Evil Scarecrow in October.

There’s no point in resolving to go to the cinema more often, because I only go if there are films I really want to see being shown. There were three in 2012, which is something of a record for me – at least since I left the UAE, where I lived just around the corner from an excellent cinema. There might be one or two movies I’d be willing to shell out £13 to see in IMAX 3D in 2013, but we’ll have to see. I will, however, continue to watch DVDs by my favourite directors, as well as trying new ones – mostly foreign-language, of course. And the really good films, I will write about here…

…Because I will continue to blog. I don’t think I could stop, to tell the truth. Posting once or twice a week is a good schedule to keep, but I suspect I won’t be able to maintain that level. I didn’t in 2012. This year, I’ll retire the Rocket Science News blog, since it’s served its purpose. It’ll stay up, but I won’t post to it anymore. Besides I have enough on with this blog, SF Mistressworks, the Whippleshield Books blog, and my Space Books blog (which I really must post to more often). I’ll remove the sf poetry blog – and perhaps work on some of the poems from it and start submitting them. I’ve only had two poems published to date, I really should start sending out more.

2012 was a bit of a convention-going year for me, although more by accident than design. Lavie Tidhar persuaded me to attend the SFX Weekender in February in Prestatyn. Much fun was had. Then there was the Eastercon in Heathrow, where I launched Rocket Science and Adrift on the Sea of Rains and nearly won the BSFA Non-Fiction Award for SF Mistressworks (it’s still eligible, by the way). Shortly after that, it was alt.fiction in Leicester, then Edge-Lit in Derby, and in November, Novacon in Nottingham. I’m not planning to attend as many cons in 2013.

Outside of genre and literature and music and cinema, 2012 was a bit meh. Some family issues were resolved. I spent Christmas in Denmark yet again, and saw some snow on the first day – but it rapidly disappeared and the weather remained wet and drizzly and dull. Santa brought me some books I want to read and some DVDs I want to watch. Oh, and some socks. The food was good, the visit to Louisiana, a modern art museum, was fascinating, and much as I hate Christmas it was a pleasant way to spend it…

And there you have it. 2012 is dead, long live 2013. I’m hoping it’ll be a good year, but it’ll be what it’ll be. That’s the way it works, you know. Life. Huh.