The View from The Keyboard: December 2020

Monday, December 14, 2020

In Print, December 2020 (and Progress)

Once again, a while has gone by since the last post, which I can only attribute to the general slow-down in the market. That and the fact I'm writing heavens-hard these days, and don't seem to have the time or inclination to produce essays about writing, as I used to in the early days of this blog. I'll be posting my yearly roundup of stats in a few weeks, but for now I wanted to round out the calendar year with a few observations of progress.

First some good news—the cover above is for the new Jay Henge anthology Sunshine Superhighway which is themed on bright tidings for the future, combating the avalanche of misery which seems to characterise today. In this one you'll find my short story “The Gentle Art of Ghosting,” in which I explore the technology required to perform surgery on whales—to save the lives of the most critically endangered creatures in desperate future decades.

To buy on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08PHPRYGV

And Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08PHPRYGV

Since I last posted I've had just a few placements. The pro market Abyss and Apex took my SF flash “Meteor Man,” and Mythic picked up my fantasy “The Headsman of Garth,” both in November. This latter piece is one of my “Avestium” stories, the fifth to find a berth. Then, a few days ago, Jay Henge accepted a reprint of my time travel story “The Winds of Time,” to appear in their forthcoming collection The Chorochronos Archives. It was only the third story I ever placed, back in September 2016, with an anthology titled The Chronos Chronicles, from Indie Authors Press.

Fresh on release today, my “Lemuria” short story “Lord of All Seas” has appeared online, in New Myths #53, which has just gone live. You can find the story here:

https://sites.google.com/a/newmyths.com/nmwebsite/fiction/lord-of-allseas

Lots of projects are in hand, including new Sherlock Holmes features, and stories spanning the SF, fantasy and horror genres. I can also say with no small delight that I seem to be working on a novel at last, a cycle of tales which I thought were going to be an ongoing arc of short stories, but which morphed very readily into a contiguous long-form narrative. More news later!

Cheers from Down Under, and have a safe and happy festive break,

Mike Adamson

ABOUT ME

The content of this section vanished when I had a catastrophic login issue years back and I never got around to rebuilding it... Well, here we go! I've lived in Australia most of my life, and had aspirations for a career in the arts at a young age. I encountered no success at first and was somewhat gun-shy of trying again, but in the mid-80s I found myself a regular contributor to the long-gone Underwater Geographic magazine, on marine mammal issue, and indeed my first published fiction was a short story in that magazine. In the later 90s, when I had already worked up a Bachelor's Degree (double major in both Marine Biology and Archaeology) I placed a story or two with a website, which made me think more seriously about coming back to creative writing. But it was not until after I had completed my Doctorate in 2012 that I scored a few non-paying placements and decided to take a crack at the fiction markets. That choice has led directly to my current situation I'm a writer of short and long material, considered myself an artist when I was younger, am an enthusiastic photographer and have been in the hobby of building models for 55 years with barely a break. My pets of choice are cats and dogs, and long ago I qualified as a scuba diver, through I've not hand a tank on my back in half my life. This is one of a collection of blogs I run, the others being Digital Kosmos (a photography showcase) and The World in Miniature (my model blog, though this one has been sadly neglected for years now--too much writing going on to do much building!) I hope you'll enjoy the wealth of material to read on this blog!