Departing 2024 for 2025 on a grey and rainy afternoon feels like a metaphor for the year gone by – not exactly what we all hoped for. For me, it’s been a real mixed bag, with some fun projects and great experiences sharing space with efforts that haven’t borne fruit…
Last year, I resolved to write a new thriller story… One thing I’ve learned since I started writing in the world of mainstream commercial fiction (rather than genre or tie-in work) is that the market is very driven by trends – they love the new thing, the in thing, and that’s what gets commissioned and will dominate the book racks in big store until the wind changes.
Recently that trend was ‘destination thrillers’, and right now it’s ‘cosy crime’ – neither of which I write! After my publisher Welbeck (who released my stand-alone novels Airside and Dark Horizon) were bought out by publishing giant Headline and rebranded as Mountain Leopard Press, it’s been hard to get traction here in the UK for the kind of high-speed, fast-paced action thrillers that are my forte.
But rather than chase the trend, I’ve been developing something new, something that plays to my thriller-writing strengths, and I hope to say more about it later in 2025. But in 2024, I decided to scratch that action itch with a new novella from my Marc Dane/Rubicon series – Moscow Rules, which I release as a free ten-part download on this website. Check it out at this link.
The response for Moscow Rules has been brilliant and enthusiastic, with many readers excited to see Marc Dane return in a new story and asking for more – so who knows, I may make this a semi-regular thing…
In the meantime, while my mainstream stuff was in a holding pattern, I spent most of 2024 back in the familiar territory of science fiction and tie-in stories; I wrote Toward The Night, a new Star Trek novel based on the Strange New Worlds TV series, and readers will see that later in 2025; but the most fun I had was revisiting some classic telefantasy shows from the 1970s – Gerry Anderson’s UFO and Space: 1999 – to pen a pair of original novellas set in those worlds. Shadow Play and The Armageddon Engine were both labours of love for me, as someone who devoured the original TV shows when I was a kid, and the reviews from fans have been terrific, highlighting the ‘authentic’ feel of the writing. That’s exactly what I was aiming for, to make the books feel like “lost episodes”, so I couldn’t be happier.
As well as prose, I also wrote some more comics in 2024, with two new jet age Commando tales – Fallen Sabre, set during the Korean War, and Pressure Point, set during the Cold War – and a surprise offer to work on strips for the 60th anniversary celebration of Stingray, another Gerry Anderson show.
2024 was also the anniversary of a few of my earlier tie-in works – Ten years since the publication of my 24 novel Deadline, and twenty (!) years since the release of my first Warhammer 40,000 novel Deus Encarmine, my first novelization The Butterfly Effect, and my first Judge Dredd novel Eclipse – click the links to read all about those books.
Of course, I did try to have a life as well as writing loads of things; I had a lovely time guesting at the Orpington Literary Festival, as well as appearing at events like the Stand By For Action 2 concert and London 1999 convention, attending Big Finish Day and Dragonmeet, travelling around the UK to Leicester, Bracknell, Nottingham, Birmingham and more to spend great weekends with old friends, visiting exhibits like Set To Stun at Gunnersbury Park and the DeHavilland museum, and getting some well-enjoyed downtime in the sun on the Balearic Islands.
But arriving in 2025, the plan is to keep doing the thing – tell stories, visit new worlds and old ones, and write on.
