Now that we're approaching year end and I'm about to go off on Christmas vacation, here's a brief review of the year:

Fiction

Sales

• Crab Apple to Realms of Fantasy.


• The Green Pit to the Usborne anthology, Fantasy Stories.


• When the Dragon Falls to Realms of Fantasy.


• The Western Front to The Third Alternative.

Although it might not seem many, it's the most stories I've sold in a year, and all to professional publications.

Publications
Only one story was actually published anywhere this year:
A Veil, a Meal, and Dust was published in Ideomancer. You can read it online here.

Novels
I finished the first draft of my second middle-reader/YA novel, Jacob's Abyss. I'm not sure what to do with that one, now. It's probably a bit short and maybe too dark for the target readership.

I multiply redrafted my first book, The Winter of the Earth. The revised version is now under consideration by an agent. She really liked the previous draft, so I'm hopeful about this one.

I've started a new middle-reader/YA novel, The Sleepers, which I've now completed just over 8,000 words of. This one is better aimed for the age range, I think.

Events
The major event of the year, of course, and the one that matters most, is that I got married to Stephanie Burgis. It was a great wedding, a wonderful honeymoon, and we're really happy married.

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Best of the Year

Short Fiction
With the usual proviso that I have read only a tiny fraction of the short fiction published in the last year and pretty much none in the first half of the year, here are my "best of", not in any particular order:

• The Algorithms for Love, by Ken Liu - Strange Horizons, 12 July 2004.


• Sergeant Chip, by Bradley Denton - F&SF, September 2004.


• Rain from Another Country, by Mark W. Tiedemann - F&SF, September 2004.


• Embers, by Rudi Dornemann - Realms of Fantasy, October 2004.


• The Great Old Pumpkin, by John Aegard - Strange Horizons, 25 October 2004


• The Lorelei, by Alex Irvine - F&SF, January 2005 (This was actually published in 2004, so I am including it.)


• Some Girlfriends Can, by Stephanie Burgis - Strange Horizons, 1 November 2004. (I realise I may not be totally unbiased here, but this was my favourite story of the year.)

You can read my reviews of all of these, plus others, in my Fiction Review Journal. I still have a pile of magazines from 2004 that I haven't yet read: Black Gate, Interzone, a few issues of F&SF, but I don't know when I'll have time to read them, so the above will have to stand.