My Writing Year: A Look Back and A Look Forward

Another year is over, and besides my usual trip to North Africa (more on that in my next post) it's time for my annual roundup of writing.

I had a fairly productive year, writing 930,000 words. While this was shy of my goal of one million words, I'm not unhappy because this year 409,000 of those words were published under my own name, more than in many years. I do a lot of ghostwriting, you see, and while I need the income it does cut down on my own work.

Part of the reason my word count under my own name was so high was a collaboration with British Science fiction author David Ryker. We came out with the first two in the Ark Ship series, about a colony ship that leaves a dying Earth only to get into more trouble than it left. It's done very well in sales, thanks in no small part to Ryker's marketing abilities.

I also came out with three books of my own. Three Passports to Trouble is the second in my Interzone Mystery series. This was followed by Emergency Transmission, Book Four of my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series. At the end of the year I came out with The Case of the Golden Greeks, Book Three of my Masked Man of Cairo mystery series.

Hmmm....I sense a trend. Lots of series! I haven't written a standalone novel in a while. Perhaps I'll remedy that in 2020. I have a Western that's been bubbling in the back of my head. I'm also going to write more in each of my series, including Trench Raiders. Yes, I've been letting that one lapse for far too long, and some of you have grumbled about that. Don't worry, you'll be getting more adventures from Company E in the autumn at the latest.

You can keep track of all my work on the right-hand side of my blog, where I'll be regularly updating the progress of each book.

Now I got to get back to work!
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A New Collaboration Out Now!

I've hinted before on this blog that I was doing a collaborative project. Well, now it's out! I teamed up with bestselling science fiction author David Ryker to write a space opera with a lot of political intrigue, friendly and hostile aliens, and a colony ship that's going to have to go through hell to save the last remnants of the human race. A blurb is below:

The Earth is dying.
Her people have fled.
And Mitch Ayers is having a real bad day.
Fifty years ago, our home was dying. We identified worlds that might be able to support human life. We built Ark Ships: huge colonization vessels carrying thousands of crew. And we set out, not knowing if we could make it to the other side of the blackness, or whether there would be anything there if we did.
Mitch wasn't supposed to have to care about any of this. He was supposed to be happily dreaming in stasis for another twenty years. That's until he wakes up on the Ark Ship Nansen, three light years off course, staring right up at the barrel of a gun. All around him, he hears the screams of the dying. Terrorists are wiping out the Nansen's crew while they sleep, and he's the only one who can do a damn thing about it.
But ain't that always the way.
Mitch knows the Nansen's crew might be the only humans left in the universe. The problem is, he quickly learns that humans aren't alone in the stars. Aliens aren't just out there, they're everywhere. And the first one he meets tries to sink its teeth into his neck...
Mitch is a long way from home, and it's not just the aliens he's up against. It's the traitors within his own crew.
Now humanity's fate rests on his shoulders. So he'll have to think fast...

David and I are hard at work finishing up the trilogy and books two and three will be out later this year.

Right now it's available at an new -release price of 99 cents. It's available here.