Thursday, December 30, 2010

2010...A Brief Round-up


So 2010 was a bit of a mixed bag, wasn't it?

Personally speaking, it was a pretty great year. Unfortunately the world's economy went tit's-up and it kind of took the shine off all that personal happiness. Never mind, though; 2011 looks like things will get even worse. But in the meantime, here's my round up of some (but by no means all) of the good stuff:

Personal highlights:

The publication of Pretty Little Dead Things
Signing a three-book deal with Solaris
Moving house and finally geting to live somewhere we love
My wife's success at work
My collection Pieces of Midnight being published by Ash Tree Press (edit: somehow I forgot to mention this first time around)
My son's first goal for his Under-7 football team

Best Reads:

The Silent Land - Graham Joyce
The Passage - Justin Cronin
Handling the Undead - John Ajvide Lindqvist (edit: just finished this on New Year's Eve)
Remember You're a One-Ball! - Quentin S. Crisp

Best Films:

A Serbian Film
Inception
(edit: just seen this)

Best Gift:

A Kindle!



(Edit: A final Good Thing that happened, late this year, was that I signed up with a literary agent, the rather wonderous Sharon Ring. Quite how I neglected to mention this earlier, I really don't know. I blame the wine.)

In other news, my novella All Your Gods Are Dead is available (with a bonus short story) for the Kindle and any other ereaders Santa might have brought you here:

Generation Next Publishing


3 comments:

Scott B said...

Yes, certainly a bipolar year overall was 2010. But one bright spot for me personally was reading your work for the first time. Rain Dogs was fabulous. Currently working my way through the trade pb of All Your Gods Are Dead. One q about this one: I'm blind, so I utilize a scanner connected to a computer to take a picture of each page and have that read back to me by synthesized speech. Thus far, the scan is nearly immaculate, but I can't make heads or tails of the words right before "- Graffiti scrawled on a lavatory wall, East London." Presumably, this is due to a different font being employed for that snippet. Can you enlighten me?

Keep churning out that delicious dark fiction.
Scott

Gary Mc said...

Hi Scott,

Wow, that's some way to read books...your desire to read is inspirational, and thankls so much for taking the time and effort to read my work. Much appreciated, my friend.

"The section in question reads:

All your gods are dead
and your childhood heroes
are ashes"

- Graffiti scrawled on a lavatory wall,
East London.

Scott B said...

Gary, when I'm happily mired in these dark worlds, so richly rendered, the hoops I sometimes have to circumnavigate to produce a clean scan don't matter a bit.

I hope I can trouble you with just one more clarification question on pgs 64-65 I believe. Doug has returned to his hotel room and begins writing on a sheet of hotel stationery. The brief scrawls he makes are likely sentences, but again the use of a markedly different font in the book has cowed my scanner and its associated software. I think there are 2, maybe 3 instances of that note, as he begins to make out something that terrifies or scares him.