I’ve seen more than a few authors close out 2014 by posting their blog stats and most-read posts, but that’s kind of like when your favorite TV show does a clip-show. Sure, you can revisit favorites, but you’ve seen ’em all already. For this blog, I had roughly the same number of visitors this year as in 2013, and I’m grateful for everyone stopping by.
The past year was, frankly, difficult and exhausting. We lost my mom to cancer over the summer — something I didn’t blog about at the time because I simply didn’t have the heart to do it — which made the summer and fall tough sledding. Actually, that’s quite an understatement. Thankfully, I have an amazing family and wonderful friends who helped me through.
Because of all this, I missed the original deadline for The Venusian Gambit, but I have fantastic and understanding editors and I’m happy it’s in the can and looking great. In the middle of all this, I also traveled for work about three times more than usual. At times, the travel was a bit of a respite, but mostly I missed my family and found my writing and other personal endeavors thrown well off track.
To be fair, while the year was trying, it wasn’t all bad. The Enceladus Crisis came out to great reviews and sales, for which I’m immensely grateful. My day job continues to like me a lot, which means I continue to put food on the table and take nice vacations now and then. I enjoyed going to BEA, DragonCon, NYCC and World Fantasy and meeting up with fans and writers and wonderfully creative folk. I went to Iceland, which was pretty awesome. Most importantly, my wife and daughter are healthy and happy and still enjoy my company.
Overall, though, I’m quite content to say farewell to 2014. I’m looking forward to a bit more routine in 2015, with (so far) less work travel scheduled. I’m hoping to revamp my exercise regimen and to write with more regularity and discipline; it’s not that I’m fat and lazy, but after this year, I’m craving a bit more structure and a lot less chaos.
I’m very much looking forward to the release of The Venusian Gambit, which marks the conclusion of the Daedalus trilogy, and doing all the blog posts and podcasts and fun stuff associated with that. I plan on going to Phoenix Comicon this May, and will hit up DragonCon, NYCC and World Fantasy again if all goes well. I’ll be back in San Francisco over the summer and hope to do a reading at Borderlands Books. It’s going to be fun. I’m proud of Gambit, both as a stand-alone novel and as a conclusion to the story I started in The Daedalus Incident. I can’t wait to see it out there in the wild.
I’m not under contract for more novels at this point, but I do have something cooking that I think will be super cool. It’s a departure from the sailing-ships-in-space, four-color adventure of the Daedalus series, and I’m excited about going in some new and different directions with my writing. The concept has been very well received by folks who matter, so it’s now about me getting it in gear and making it into a real thing. And that’s all I got to say about that; naturally, I’ll keep you posted.
Thanks for reading this blog and keeping up with my doings. Thank you to everyone who’s read and supported The Daedalus Incident and The Enceladus Crisis. My thanks also to all the folks who helped make 2014 better than it might have been otherwise.
Here’s to the new year.
#SFWApro
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Michael J. Martinez 