2010 was the year of writing The Wall of Night Book Two—& I finished the manuscript yesterday: woot! And posted ‘all about it’ on the Supernatural Underground.

It was also the year of seeing The Heir of Night published in the USA/Canada, Australia and New Zealand in October, with publication for the UK scheduled for this year, March 2011. Since publication, it’s been great to get some really nice pro and semi-pro reviews as well as positive reader feedback, some of which I’ve shared with you here on “…Anything, Really.” And it was a huge thrill to make the Christchurch City Librraies’ Simply the Best of 2010 list, here.

And the year of seeing Thornspell released in paperback, with a very nice related feature in the NZ Book Council’s quarterly journal, Booknotes, Spring 2010.

2010 was also the year of beginning to sell foreign rights to the Wall of Night series, of going to Worldcon in Melbourne and continuing to do books and writer interviews for Women on Air, on Plains 96.9 FM—the highlight being compering the public event for Andrea Levy, award winning author of Small Island and The Long Song.  I also got to continue interviewing wonderful poets and to start interviewing speculative fiction authors, including Jennifer Fallon, Nalini Singh, Mary Victoria and Ripley Patton, which was all great fun.

As celebrated on 30 December, I also commenced blogging myself, both here on “…Anything Really and on the first of the month on the Supernatural Underground—as well as doing guest posts with Eos (USA) and Orbit (UK/AU/NZ), with other writers such as Marianne de Pierres and a Big Idea post on John Scalzi’s Whatever.

And 2010 was the year of the Christchurch earthquake, with an initial 7.1 quake on September 4 and over 4000 “after shocks” since them, some of which, at 5.1 and 4.9 etcetera, have been earthquakes in their own right. The latest “swarm” (32 over a 24 hour period) occurred on Boxing Day and comprised a series of sharp and also shallow quakes that did a lot of building damage again. Having said all that, with no deaths and realtively few major injuries, I still think it would be fair to say that we’re all thanking our earthquake building codes as well as our ‘lucky stars’—as well as hoping for a much less shaky 2011!

As always, I read a lot of books during the course of the year and mentioned a few of them a while back, here. But because it is New Year here are those, which among so many wonderful books, stood out the most for me:

Novel:

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

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Non Fiction:

Feeling for Daylight, The Photographs of Jack Adamson by Rhian Gallagher

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Poetry:

Tigers at Awhitu by Sarah Broom

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Young Adult:

Immortal Beloved by Cate Tiernan

(I don’t feel I read enough Junior fiction to make a selection in this category—& I read James Norcliffe’s The Loblolly Boy in 2009 so I can’t pick that!)

As for what’s coming up in the New Year—life I find is generally what happens when you’re busy making other plans (nods to John Lennon), but I am fairly certain that I will be writing The Wall of Night, Book Three. Other than that—well, we’ll all just have to wait and see.

Again—Happy New Year to you all!