JAMES SWALLOW

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Annual

Something Borrowed (2022 Edition)

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January means I get my yearly report on the Public Lending Right from the British Library, detailing all of my UK library book loans for the previous 12 months! This is always great to see, because I warms my heart to know that readers are reading my stuff and that libraries around the country continue to do their most important work of putting books in the hands of people who may not otherwise have access to them.

If you’re not familiar with how the PLR pays back writers (and also editors, illustrators and translators), here’s my annual explanation:

The PLR is a system where people who’ve worked on books that are in public libraries get a little revenue each time somebody borrows them. It’s a way to repay writers (and others) who won’t be earning a royalty from a sale in a bookstore. The PLR pays a nominal fee from a communal ‘pot’ of money based on how borrowed you were, and in the interests of fairness, you can’t earn more than around £6000, so the big name authors out there don’t get to hog all the cash.

If you are a writer/editor/illustrator/translator and a resident of the UK or Ireland, and you ever need a reason for donating your books to the library – on top of all the obvious ones like promoting reading and supporting this valuable and increasingly undermined public service! – this is it.

Here’s my Top Ten Library Loans of my novels for 2022 (with 2021’s position in brackets)

1 (1) Rogue
2 (-) Outlaw
3 (3) Ghost
4 (2) Shadow
5 (4) Exile
6 (5) Nomad
7 (-) Airside
8 (6) Garro: Weapon of Fate
9 (-) Firewall
10 (9/7) Ghost in the Shell / The Buried Dagger

Last year, my 5th Marc Dane novel Rogue held on to the top spot, with the 6th book Outlaw coming in just below; all six of my Marc Dane books filled the top half of the top ten, with just under 10,000 combined loans between them. Also new in the chart this year was my new stand-alone thriller Airside and my Splinter Cell tie-in novel Firewall, and the number #10 position was shared by my co-authored novelization of the Ghost in the Shell movie and my last Horus Heresy tome The Buried Dagger.

I often get readers telling me apologetically that they got one of my books from a library to read instead of buying it – but that’s okay! I still get a few pence each time a book of mine gets lent out, so don’t feel guilty about using libraries. In fact, for some creators, that bit of PLR cash might be the only money they ever see from that work.

I say this every year because it’s true – I wholeheartedly believe that libraries are the lifeblood of many communities and a vital resource that builds lifetime readers, and as always, I want to show my appreciation to everyone working hard in our libraries across the UK and Ireland, and to all the people working to keep them running.The PLR and our libraries are constantly under threat from government cutbacks, so if you are a writer or a reader, please do your bit to help support both as best you can – and keep on reading!

2K22 Games

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And the last of my annual year-ender blogs reviews my gaming progress during 2022. I made a definite attempt to revisit Cyberpunk 2077 (and I’m still not done in Night City just yet, I’m really making the experience last) as well as completing Far Cry 6 and returning to Sniper Elite 4’s multiplayer in the company of my weekly gaming crew.

I did, for the very first time, complete a racing game (Dirt 5) from start to finish! That may not seem like a big deal, but it’s a milestone for me… I’ve often found the curves of my ability and a driving game’s difficulty level tend to part ways at some point in the last third of the experience and I never ‘get gud’ enough to go beyond… But overall, I played less new titles last year, preferring to concentrate on a smaller number more intently.

My game of the year? I’m enjoying the WW2 action of Sniper Elite 5, but I have to give the prize to the delightful cat simulator Stray.

Here’s the full list:
Deep Rock Galactic, Dirt 5, Among Us, Enlisted, Cat Burglar, Rainbow Six: Extraction, Ghost of Tsushima: Legends, Trivia Quest, MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, Far Cry 6: Vaas – Insanity, Need For Speed Heat, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (including beta), Sniper Elite 5, Superhot, Heavenly Bodies, Stray.

2K22 Books

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Year-end blog #3 compiles my reading for 2022; this year I tried an experiment to shake up my book genre choices and make an attempt to get stuff read that was otherwise not getting a look-in.

How? I made an IF-THEN flowchart breaking up my massive TBR pile into science fiction, thriller and non-fiction categories, with sub-categories for tie-ins and a once-a-month ‘wildcard’ choice. It’s worked pretty well and got me to pick up books that might otherwise have languished, so I’m going to keep it up in 2023. Other stats of note: I broke my reading goal last year; over half my 2022 reading was in eBook format; and I read a bunch of advanced copies and as-yet-unreleased stuff, which was cool.

Top picks for 2022 were Chris Thompson & Andrew Clements’ brilliant Moonbase Alpha Technical Operations Manual, Mike Sutton’s Typhoon and Jake Avila’s Cave Diver.

Here’s the full list:
The Autobiography of Mr Spock (Una McCormack), Steel Fear (Brandon Webb & John David Mann), The Art of NASA (Piers Bizony), Crises and Conflicts (Ian Whates, ed.), Moonbase Alpha Technical Operations Manual (Chris Thompson & Andrew Clements), Storm Dragon [aka Sea Strike] (James H. Cobb), Inferno Squad (Christie Golden), Typhoon (Mike Sutton), Watch Dogs: Stars & Stripes (Sean Grigsby & Stewart Hotston), The Kaiju Preservation Society (John Scalzi), Space: 1999 volume 2 – Earthbound (Various), Escape from New York: The Official Story of the Film (John Walsh) , I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (Trevor Paglen), The Island (Adrian McKinty), Aurora: The Pentagon’s Secret Hypersonic Spyplane (Bill Sweetman), No Man’s Land (Kirsten Beyer & Mike Johnson), The Unsettling Stars (Alan Dean Foster) Winter’s Gifts (Ben Aaronovitch), Harrier: How to be a Fighter Pilot (Paul Tremelling), Watch Dogs Legion: Daybreak Legacy (Stewart Hotston), Genocide Mage (Ben Counter), Airfix: Celebrating 50 Years of the World’s Greatest Plastic Kits (Arthur Ward), 10 Stories (Andy Farrant), BadAsstronauts (Grady Hendrix), Foxbat (James Barrington), Police Helicopter Operations Manual (Richard Brandon), Sympathy for the Devil (Seth McFarlane), Double or Nothing (Kim Sherwood), UFO: Destruct Positive! (Andy Lane), The History of the Stealth Game (Kirk McKeand), Foxbat (Peter Cave), They Shouldn’t Have Killed His Dog (Edward Gross & Mark A. Altman), Hard Reboot (Django Wexler), Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (Peter Pomerantsev), Alias Emma (Ava Glass), More Beautiful Than Death (David Mack), The Men Who Created Gundam (Hideki Ohwada), The End (James Patterson with Brendan Dubois), Strike Fighters (Tom Willard), Celestial (M.D. Lachlan), Estate Planning For Authors (M.L. Buchman), Sharuq (Bill Keith), Crysis: Escalation (Gavin G. Smith), A History of Heavy Metal (Andrew O’Neill), Armored (Mark Greaney), The Launch Party (Lauren Forry), The Buckaroo Banzai Collectors’ Compendium (DeWayne Todd), Night Stalkers: Twilight Justice (Duncan Long), Star Cops – The High Frontier Vol.1 (Various) Twilight Company (Alexander Freed), Letters of Note: Space (Shaun Usher, ed.), Cave Diver (Jake Avila), Titanium Rain Vol.1 (Josh Finney), When The Sparrow Falls (Neil Sharpson), Blank Spots on the Map (Paglen), Black Ops: Jungle Kill (Jim Eldridge), Rebel Rising (Beth Revis), Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat (Dan Hampton).

2K22 Movies

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The second of my annual year-ender blogs looks at my movie-going habits for 2022 – a few less flicks this year, but still a big chunk fell firmly in the ‘action’ genre. I also ran my own movie weekend in the summer, binge-watching a bunch of Top Gun-type flicks in the run-up to the release of the sequel – and in a choice that will surprise no-one, Top Gun Maverick was pretty much my pick of the year, with the nutty Bullet Train coming a close second.

The full list:
The Matrix Resurrections, Nobody, The Guilty, Vanguard, Army of Thieves, One Shot, Godzilla vs. Kong, Collide, Hard Target 2, The Adam Project, The Suicide Squad, Safe House, People Just Do Nothing: Big In Japan, Blacklight, Black Eagle (aka R2B: Return to Base, Soar into the Sun), Red Sky, Sky Fighters (aka Lock Direction), Les Chevaliers du Ciel (aka Sky Fighters), Sky Hunter, Not A Game, The Bubble, Metal Gods, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Venom: Let there be Carnage, Top Gun Maverick, The Bob’s Burgers Movie, Ghostbusters Afterlife, Interceptor, Thor: Love and Thunder, Gerry Anderson: A Life Uncharted, The Gray Man, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, Filmed in Supermarionation, Inside the Mind of a Cat, Sniper: Rogue Mission, In Search of Tomorrow, The 355, Uncharted, GoldenEra, Bullet Train, Werewolf by Night, Blackout, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Morbius, Ambulance, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, King of Thieves, Glass Onion, The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari.

TWENTY TWO’D

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So more of the same, or better than last year? To be honest, 2022 was both of those things at once!

My biggest releases last year were two thriller novels I had a great time writing; the first was my all-new original stand-alone Airside, published by Welbeck, a high-pressure ticking-clock story about a down-on-his-luck businessman trapped overnight in an airport who finds a bag of criminals’ money; the second was Firewall, a fast-paced action-adventure based on the Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell stealth espionage games.

I had a lot of fun working on both – Airside allowed me to exercise some different writing muscles and Firewall let me take on one of my favourite game characters and write my first prose fiction under the Tom Clancy umbrella!

Beyond those two, I also wrote a new Commando comic – “Old Dogs”, an air combat story for the series’ Falklands War anniversary, and my best-selling Marc Dane novels Outlaw and Shadow arrived in new paperback, audiobook and American mass-market editions.

Shadow wasn’t the only one of my books to go international in 2022 – Airside appeared in Bulgarian (my first time in that territory!), Rogue in Czech, The Ashes of Tomorrow in German, and Firewall in French and German.

But it wasn’t all work – it was just mostly work. Still, I did get out to a handful of events, including promoting Firewall with Aconyte books and meeting lots of readers at the huge UK Games Expo and more bijou Dragonmeet, and chairing a panel on spy thrillers at Capital Crime 2022 with fellow authors Mick Herron, Ava Glass, Marina Palmer and Tim Glister. As the colder months rolled in, I took a well-deserved trip out to Southern Spain, using the opportunity to recharge a little and dig in to research for an upcoming thriller project (more on that later)…

I say “well-deserved” because after strenuously avoiding a coronavirus infection since 2019, my household finally took the COVID bullet in the autumn and it was pretty horrible, but nowhere near as bad had some have had it. I personally got off lightly with a week of flu-like symptoms, brain fog and zero energy, so I’m counting that in the win column.

Of course, not everything work-wise is hit after hit; creatives are always under pressure to sing the praises of their successes, but we seldom talk about the misses along with this hits. It’s important to note that some gigs just don’t come off; case in point for me, I missed out on three big projects during 2022, which for various reasons went beyond my grasp, including one very cool Star Trek job that slipped right out of my hands because of scheduling conflicts. But, as they say, them’s the breaks.

Still, I got a lot of projects completed in these past twelve months, many of which will be seeing the light of day in 2023 – out later this month will be Dragonfire, the second of my Splinter Cell novels, and Knight of Grey, my final Nathaniel Garro story, as part of the grand Horus Heresy / Siege of Terra series of books. As has happened to me more than once writing modern thrillers, the setting of Dragonfire was affected by the geopolitics unfolding in the real world in 2022… And as for Knight of Grey, that novella is the culmination of a storyline I kicked off back in 2007 with The Flight of the Eisenstein. It’s been a long journey, and the end is in sight…

Following later in 2023, I’m hoping The Division: Heartland videogame will be released (the date’s still to be confirmed by publishers Ubisoft as I write this), which features some of my most recent game script work, writing dialogue for an enemy faction called ‘the Vultures’; but this new year’s big new project is my next stand-alone action thriller novel for Welbeck/Headline – the title and details of I will be officially announcing very soon…

Here’s to a great 2023!