Twelve'd

The year ends, not with a bang, but with a long, drawn-out sigh. You know the kind, the one you emit when you slip into a nice, warm bath? That noise is 2012’s workload slipping off my shoulders and the sudden arrival of a moment where I can stop and actually hear myself think. My Yuletide break gave me some much-needed downtime to appreciate the events of the past twelve months and reflect on where I want to go in the new year.

A whole bunch of stuff by me hit the stores this year; my third Horus Heresy novel Fear To Tread, which was a huge hit, and the second omnibus of my Warhammer 40,000 Blood Angels books. In fact, I wrote a whole lot of stuff from the grimdark world of the 41st millennium, with several eBooks, short stories, novellas, scriptbooks and foreign-language editions; I also did a couple of Horus Heresy audio dramas, Burden of Duty and Sword of Truth. Elsewhere in the audio medium, the Stargate series I’d been writing and editing since 2010 was finally released in two box sets, the first featuring my episode Half Life. I didn’t neglect videogames either, having co-written the Xbox 360 Kinect game Fable: The Journey.

It seemed like ever other weekend was a convention or an event of some sort – from the great Doctor Who and SF conventions run by the Starfury team, lit-cons like Olympus and Alt.Fiction, the multiple Black Library events in Chicago and all over the UK – but the highlight of those was the brilliant BL Expo over in Chestermere, just outside of Calgary in Alberta. A bunch of us authors made the trip to Canada’s great white north and we were delighted by the warmth of the welcome.

It was also a decent year for accolades; I got nominated for BAFTA’s Best Story videogames award for my work on Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and while we sadly didn’t bring home the gold, DXHR did go on to rope in a whole bunch of other gongs, including the Canadian Videogames Award for Best Writing. I also made it on to the New York Times Bestsellers list for the second time in my career, with Fear To Tread; the book also topped the UK’s science-fiction and fantasy charts, beating out the entire Game of Thrones saga and The Hobbit for first place. I was pretty damned pleased about that.

I think I’m also going to remember 2012 as the year tabletop gaming came back into my life with a vengeance (I’m looking at you, Wil Wheaton), and it was a welcome return. I also don’t want to think about how much money I’ve spend on board games since last January.

So looking forward to 2013 means new Star Trek projects, with my eBook The Stuff of Dreams out in March and my participation in the new “event” miniseries The Fall later in the year. There will be more Warhammer 40,000 and Horus Heresy fiction to come, and I’m hoping my long-delayed Blake’s 7: The Liberator Chronicles story will finally see light of day. In the weeks and months ahead I’ll also be announcing the release of a new novel based on series I’ve never worked on before, and a cool tie-in to the anniversary of a certain traveller in time and space; and I may just be able to reveal more about the epic top secret videogames projects I’ve been working on…