Continuing my tradition of posting end of year wrap ups late…

2016 was a mixed year for me, personally. We lost a lot of great people including some of my idols (I’m listening to David Bowie’s new EP right now) and people close to me. The internet seems to be getting more and more toxic by the day, and the less said about Brexit and the US election the better.

But there was plenty of ups to offset the downs. I moved into a new apartment that doesn’t turn into an oven in the summer, and a new role on a very exciting project in my day job. It means I’ll be busier than I’ve been recently, but the work will be much more fulfilling.

My writing went very well, too. I hit 282,441 words over the whole year which is a new record (I wrote 275,872 words in 2014 and 255,470 in 2015). There was plenty of editing in there as well so I’m happy with that. I’ve got ambitious plans for this year, so I’m hoping to break 300,000 words. We’ll see.

I worked on several new projects during that time including the second and third Leah King books, The Girl in the Wilderness and the upcoming The Girl in the Machine, the second book in my zombie series (releasing later this year) and a prequel for that same series. I also wrote some short fiction – a new Glitch Mitchell story for a dinosaur anthology, Sitala, which is a science fiction story that will appear in the upcoming UnCommon Minds anthology and another science fiction story called Pod Fifteen which should also come out later this year.

And I also continued my streak of having my fiction published when The Ride appeared in Dark Fuse Magazine.

And, of course, I released a new book – The Girl in the Wilderness.

Sales have been good so far. Series tend to sell better than one off books, and I’ve definitely seen a bump in sales of The Girl in the City since the sequel was released. As I’ve mentioned before, I hadn’t intended to write any more books about Leah, but people seemed to be looking for more, and I’m glad I decided to continue her story. Even if the books turned out to be longer than I’d planned and delayed my main release.

Last but not least, I appeared on Preston Leigh’s excellent 30-Minute Author Interviews podcast and talked about time travel, penguins, Glitch Mitchell and cheese.

So, that was 2016.

I’ll be back in a couple of days to talk about what I’ve got planned for 2017.

In the meantime, you could start the year off right by subscribing to my mailing list and getting four free books.

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[Farewell, 2016 by Philip Harris first appeared on Solitary Mindset on 8th January 2017]