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!
