Looking Ahead to 2008

I realized a couple of days ago that I couldn’t remember the last time I took a blog hiatus longer than a day or two. A telling sign that it’s time for a virtual vacation. So I’m shutting Confessions down until New Year’s – and any new reviews and articles of mine will be updated over here – and this post is a way for me to look back and ahead.

Suffice to say, 2007 was a workaholic’s delight, filled with new markets, wing-stretching and many, many words written in the name of freelancing to pay the bills. I didn’t write as much fiction as I would have liked, but there was my first (and hopefully, not last) appearance in EQMM, a couple of excellent anthologies I was proud to be part of, and a couple of stories I’ve begun to or hope to shop around. And if there’s one piece I’m most proud of, this is it.

Then there was the reading. A lot of mediocre books, some outright bad ones, but so much good. 2007 was especially good on the international crime fiction front, for books hard to pigeonhole and for writers stretching beyond series comforts. There are enough lists and favorites to go around, which is why I’m looking ahead to next year – or more accurately, that my head’s been in 2008 for a good five months now.

But just because I’ve already read a number of good books published after the new year, there are tons more to look forward to. One in particular entered my mind after an out of the blue phone call Monday night. It was Ali Karim, around midnight his time, sounding passionate and evangelical about a book he was reading that he called “the best book he’d read since SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.” When Ali talks like this, I listen. Our tastes don’t always match up, but I suspect in this case, it will.

So what are you looking forward most to reading in 2008? Backblog away – and until then, happiest of holidays, whatever you’re celebrating, to all.