Seventeen (Again?)

It Me

Before I sat down to write my usual year-ender blog, I re-read last year's edition and I was struck by how things have moved on - and stayed the same. Here's a direct quote: "Last year was really a rollercoaster for me. Externally, pressures about the world at large, political fears reawakening and a general sense of what-the-hell-is-happening put a drag on everything else..." 

I can pretty much cut-and-paste this comment about 2016 straight into my 2017 blog with a perfect fit. It has been, with no sense of exaggeration, a rather mad year. I've tried hard to concentrate on the good and not get caught up in the crazy, looking at the important personal stuff rather than raging at things I can't change...

And on that, things have been going well for me. Building on the success for my first original thriller Nomad, the second book in the series - Exile - came out in the summer in hardcover, with a paperback release at the end of December. Exile looks set to do as well as Nomad did, if not better, so once more I want to thank everybody who supported my work by buying a copy. 

I've finished work on book three - Ghost - for release in May, and if all goes well, my ex-MI6 agent hero Marc Dane will return for a fourth adventure in 2019. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself; like I said last year, I'm taking this one step at a time. At a Q&A this year, someone asked me if I was angling to cash out in some big Hollywood movie deal, and I said not bloody likely; I'm hoping to keep telling Dane's stories for a long while yet.

Coincidentally, the title "Ghost" kept coming up in 2017. As well as the new Marc Dane book, I worked on a novelization of the live action adaptation of the anime/manga Ghost in the Shell, which was an...interesting...experience. I'll say this: I couldn't do all the things I wanted to do with the GitS novel, and I only took on the project because I am a big fan of Masamune Shirow's original comics, so I'm disappointed that we ended up having to go a bit vanilla with it. The final version of the book, which I couldn't finish up because of other commitments, was taken on by Abbie Bernstein to handle the last pass and edits and she did a great job under testing circumstances.

The other big "Ghost" project of mine was Fallen Ghosts - a downloadable content, story and mission expansion for the Tom Clancy franchise videogame Ghost Recon Wildlands. This was hard work and often challenging, but looking back now it is done and dusted, I'm pleased with how things came together and I liked working with the team at Ubisoft Montpellier - a self-professed gang of 'punks' who welcomed me into a team characterised by honesty and passion. Most rewarding of all, Fallen Ghosts was a big hit with the Wildlands player community, and as a long-time Ghost Recon fan (all the way back to the 2001 PC original!) that meant a lot to me. Fallen Ghosts wasn't the only videogame project I worked on in 2017, but the other two have still not been officially announced, so I won't be talking about them until later this year...

My other writing projects for 2017 were tie-ins; in the world of Warhammer 40,000, my two Sisters of Battle novels Faith & Fire and Hammer & Anvil were finally gathered under one cover, along with an adaptation of the audio drama Red & Black, in Sisters of Battle: The Omnibus, and to add a little something extra to the collection I wrote a brand new original short story called "Heart & Soul". I'd hoped at one point to write a third Sisters novel, but that's not on the cards at the moment, so for now this is my "definitive" Adepta Sororitas collection. My other 40K outing was Corsair: The Face of the Void, an audio drama project that spun out of me wanted to write something a bit different in the Grimdark Future of the 41st Millennium; this is essentially the pilot episode for an ongoing series of audios set aboard the rogue trader starship Corsair, featuring renegade captain Athene Santiago and her misfit crew. I'm hoping listeners will take to it enough to warrant future stories...

And speaking of starships, there was one other tie-in that I signed on to write back in December of 2015 which took a year to get done and announced - Fear Itself, an original novel based on the Star Trek Discovery series. It was tough keeping this one under wraps while the show debuted and everyone was talking about it, having to bite my tongue when the books were being promoted at the big Star Trek cons in the USA because I couldn't say anything about my particular part of the project! I had to work for months on this under near-total secrecy, paralleling the production of the TV episodes as I put together the storyline for the book. Fear Itself will be out in the summer, and I'll be talking about it in more detail in the months ahead.

The rest of 2017 I filled up with some fun travel and cool events, including the ReFramed games festival in Brighton, the Trek-On convention in the summer, the Black Library Weekender and a bunch of library Q&A's with m'colleague Ben Aaronovitch. I was nominated for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Prize, visited the Red Bull Soapbox Rally and Drone Racing League world championship finals, not to mention spending a week in Santa Monica with the ace folks from League of Legends creators Riot Games and a packed trip to Iceland that was cool in both senses of the word.

On the edge of the Faxi waterfall in Iceland

Here's to more of that for 2018, and less of the other stuff!