The Wrap Up

I don’t talk much about real life on here anymore. It hasn’t been a great year, mostly due to various medical issues in the family, but we’ve had worse. I prefer to concentrate on the more pleasant aspects of life, most notably reading and writing. So with that in mind . . .

I read 167 books this year, not as much as some years but still a very respectable total. That includes more actual pulps and pulp reprints than I’ve ever read in a single year, so I’m pleased with that. Here are my top ten favorite books I read, in alphabetical order by author:

CASINOS, MOTELS, GATORS: STORIES, Ben Boulden
NORDIC AND FINN, Peter Brandvold
GUNSMOKE RECKONING, Joseph Chadwick
WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH: THE ILLUSTRATED MEN’S ADVENTURE ANTHOLOGY, Robert Deis, Wyatt Doyle, Josh Alan Friedman, eds.
THE SHADOWED CIRCLE COMPENDIUM, Steve Donoso, ed.
HIGH FLIERS, MIDDLEWEIGHTS, AND LOWLIFES: DAVID GOODIS IN THE PULPS, Cullen Gallagher
THE COMPLETE CASEBOOK OF CARDIGAN, VOLUME 1, Frederick Nebel
THE SHADOW OF VENGEANCE, Scott Oden
NEITHER BEG NOR YIELD, Jason M. Waltz, ed.
HELL STRIP, Lee Richards (Lee E. Wells)

That’s the new, expanded edition of WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH. I read the original version when it came out a number of years ago. When I was looking over my list of books read this year, there were many, many more that could have been included because I read a lot of really good books. As always, narrowing it down to ten was not easy.

As for writing, my production actually went up a little, although it’s difficult for me to comprehend how that happened. I don’t have an exact number, but I know I wrote right around three-quarters of a million words. I’m not expecting to write as much next year, or probably ever again, to be honest. I’d be perfectly happy to do half a million words in 2025 and after that? Well, some people actually retire, even writers. That’s starting to look very appealing to me.

But that’s on down the road, and for now, many thanks to all of you reading this for sticking with me. May next year be better for all of us.

The Wrap Up

I think we all know there was no shortage of terrible things happening this year, but why dwell on the negative? I’m going to try to look at a few positive things.

First and foremost, I’m still here, and Livia, Shayna, and Joanna are still putting up with me. This day and age, that’s something to feel good about.

A few days ago, I celebrated the 47^th anniversary of my first fiction sale. Most writing careers don’t last that long, so I’m very happy to still be turning out the pages, even though there are fewer of them than there used to be. I also think I’m still writing with a fair degree of competence. I have a legitimate shot at being in this crazy business for half a century, and that seems pretty good to me.

I also read a lot of good books. Here are my ten favorites for the year, alphabetical by author:

PUNK & OTHER STORIES, Cleve F. Adams
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MATTHEW SCUDDER, Lawrence Block
THE ART OF RON LESSER, VOLUME 1: DEADLY DAMES AND SEXY SIRENS, Robert Deis, Bill Cunningham, and J. Kingston Pierce, eds.
SPILL THE JACKPOT, A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)
MALIBU BURNING, Lee Goldberg
LORD OF A SHATTERED LAND, Howard Andrew Jones
DARK AVENGER: THE STRANGE SAGA OF THE SHADOW, Will Murray
THE EYE OF THE TIGER, Wilbur Smith
THE NOVELIZERS, David Spencer
THE GRAVES IN THE MEADOW, Manning Lee Stokes

There were plenty of other excellent books I could have included. It was difficult narrowing the list down to ten. If you check the posts for each month you’ll find lots of other good reading that I recommend.

I plan to write about the same amount in 2024 but I hope there’ll be a few more books with my name on them. We’ll see. And I certainly intend to keep reading as much as I can, although my attention span isn’t what it once was and that makes it a challenge to get through longer books. So I don’t really foresee a lot changing, which actually makes me a little nervous because life has a habit of throwing curveballs at all of us. As always, we’ll have to wait and see what happens, but I wish all of you out there the very best for the New Year.

Reading and Writing Update

I said for years that I was going to slow down on the writing, but I never managed to do it to any meaningful degree. Well, age and circumstances have done it for me. Halfway through the year, I'm on pace to write just a hair more than half a million words this year. I realize that's still pretty productive, but it's half of what I used to do, and the frustrating part is that I'm still working almost as many hours at it. Getting the pages done just takes me longer.

But on the reading front, I've read 80 books so far this year, which is pretty good, I think.

Reading or writing, we do what we can do and move on to whatever's next, I guess.

The Wrap Up

As we all know, 2021 has been a rough year in many respects. At times, I’ve felt as if I were keeping busy just so I wouldn’t think about how many unpleasant and downright tragic things were happening in the world.

But I did keep busy: I wrote somewhere around 1.1 million words, the most in several years. I read 202 books, the most I’ve ever read since I started keeping records 41 years ago. (My previous record was 186.) I not only kept my own writing going, but I also sold my publishing imprint, Rough Edges Press, to Wolfpack Publishing and stayed on as the editor, guiding the development of a line that I think can compete with anybody in the mystery/suspense/men’s adventure field. So I think I accomplished quite a bit, although it wasn’t enough for me to feel caught up. I’ll never be caught up . . .

Not for a while yet, anyway. But another thing I’ve done this year is decide on the date when I actually will retire, except for maybe writing a few more books of my own and keeping this blog and the WesternPulps email group going, assuming those platforms still exist. More about that later, as the time approaches. For now, full speed ahead.

Which means listing my top ten favorites of all the books I read this year, in the order in which I read them:

GUN RUNNER, Larry Correia and John Brown
THE SPIDER: FURY IN STEEL, Will Murray
A WRITER PREPARES, Lawrence Block
MAGAZINES I REMEMBER, Hugh B. Cave
THE COMANCHE KID, James Robert Daniels
5 DECEMBERS, James Kestrel
MASTER OF MYSTERY: THE RISE OF THE SHADOW, Will Murray
STRIPPED AND BRANDED, Peter Brandvold
AMBA, Andrew Hallman
DROWNING ARE THE DEAD, Brent Towns

The last two on that list aren’t available yet. They’re books I’m publishing at Rough Edges Press, and they’ll be out next year. I read a lot of good books this year, and there are twenty or thirty more that could have made the cut for the top ten. I especially want to acknowledge the three issues of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY from Bob Deis and Bill Cunningham, BATTLING BRITONS and the two follow-up issues from Justin Marriott, the Levon Cade series by Chuck Dixon, THE COMPLETE CASES OF THE RAMBLER, VOLUME 1 by Fred MacIsaac, THE GUN WITH THE WAITING NOTCH by Stone Cody (Thomas E. Mount), and two thrillers by William Christie that I’ll also be publishing next year, DARKNESS UNDER HEAVEN and BARGAIN WITH THE DEVIL. I’m very glad I had so many good books to read, and I want to give a big thank you to all the authors, editors, and publishers who made that possible.

I mentioned above that I wrote around 1.1 million words this year, the 17^th straight year I’ve hit the million word mark. This is where I always say I won’t do that much next year, and then I wind up writing that much anyway. Right now, I’d say it’s doubtful that I’ll do a million words in 2022, but stranger things have happened. I still have some ghost work lined up, and I plan to write a few books under my own name, if I can get around to them. So we’ll see.

And that pretty much sums up my attitude toward everything that’s waiting for us in 2022. We’ll see. Because there’s nothing else we can do.

The Wrap Up

I don’t have to tell any of you that this has been a pretty rotten year in many ways, but around here, Livia and I have been fortunate in that we’ve been able to carry on working as usual. Because of that, I topped one million words of fiction for the 16^th straight year (my usual goal of slowing down not having panned out, also as usual). That million words encompassed eight solo novels and five collaborative novels. No short fiction this year, but I plan to do at least one novella in 2021. No fiction under my own name, either, but that will change next year.

On the reading front, I had my second-best year since I started keeping records in 1980, with 164 books read. The fact that we were home more than usual may have had something to do with that. Here are my top ten favorites from the books I read, in alphabetical order by author and with links to my reviews of them:

WILD BLOOD, A.C. Abbott
THE SPICY-ADVENTURE MEGAPACK, Robert Leslie Bellem, Victor Rousseau, et al.
HOLOCAUST HOUSE, Norbert Davis
A HACK’S NOTEBOOK, Ben Haas
DEATH SQUAD, Alan Hebden
FOREVER AND A DAY, Anthony Horowitz
DEAD EVIDENCE: THE COMPLETE BLACK MASK CASES OF HARRIGAN, Ed Lybeck
ENGINEERING INFINITY #1: THE DUST OF STARS, Robert E. Vardeman
WHEN TIGERS ARE HUNTING: THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES OF CORDIE, SOLDIER OF FORTUNE,VOLUME 1, W. Wirt
A TRAWL AMONG THE SHELVES: LAWRENCE BLOCK BIBLIOGRAPHY 1958-2020, Terry Zobeck

That’s four books reprinted from the pulps and two more by authors who sold to the pulps (Abbott and Haas). There were a lot of other good books on my list that came close to cracking the top ten. Overall, it was a good year for reading, and I already have a lot of great stuff lined up to read in 2021.

Which I hope will be a vast improvement for all of us. I’m not at all convinced that it will be, mind you . . . but there’s nothing wrong with hoping.

Pages and End of the Month Update

There were errands to run this morning and I only got in half a day at the computer, but in that time, I wrote 13 pages, so I was well pleased with that. (I'm not superstitious . . . too much.) I'm getting fairly close to the end of this book, so I'm hoping that will help me pick up some steam.

That gave me 261 pages total for July. I need to be writing 350-400 pages per month in order to get everything done without it being too ridiculously late.

I also read 13 books in July. I was kind of hoping to finish another one so it would be 14, but like I said, I'm not too superstitious . . .

Blog Business

I have a pretty good backlog of books I want to read and review, so I'm going to make a slight change in how I schedule posts. For the Forgotten Books series on Friday, I'm going to concentrate on books that are out of print or in public domain, and for older books that currently have reprint editions available, those reviews will go up whenever I have one ready, probably under labels like Vintage Noir, Vintage Westerns, etc. Reviews of current books will be posted on Monday, if I've got one. I realize there's no real reason to post about this, but doing so might make it a little more likely that I'll remember what I'm doing. Can't underestimate the value of that these days.

Halfway Point

Last year at this time, you may recall, I was moaning and complaining about how my long streaks of writing at least a million words a year and reading at least 100 books a year might well come to an end in 2019. Actually, as the year played out, neither of those things happened. So, how am I doing this year at the halfway point?

Despite all my blathering about how I was going to slow down, I’ve written about 550,000 words so far in 2020, and my schedule is full for the rest of the year (actually, a book or two probably will slop over into next year), so it looks like I have a reasonable shot at the million words for the 16^th year in a row. Which is fine, whether it happens or not.

On the reading front, I’ve read 84 books so far this year, so I’m on a pace to have one of my best reading years ever. I guess maybe I’ve had more time to read, although it doesn’t seem like it.

I hope I haven’t jinxed either of those things by posting about them. We’ll see what the second half of the year brings. Some improvement in real life would be fine with me. All this other stuff doesn’t mean much in the long run.

The Wrap Up

This has been an . . . interesting . . . year, dominated by three things: the knee surgeries that had Sammy, our Great Pyrenees, laid up for the first part of the year; storm damage to our roof in March that led to a three-month struggle with the insurance company before we were able to get it replaced; and finally Livia’s cancer diagnosis in July, followed by surgery, radiation treatments, and many, many doctor visits. Yet we’ve come through all of them. Sammy doesn’t get around as well as he once did, but other than that he’s doing fine. We have a really nice new roof. And Livia’s radiation treatments will be wrapping up soon. In the midst of all this, we decided to get in better shape and have been walking, walking, walking, around five miles a day for me and more than that for her. I really miss it now when things interfere with us getting our steps in. So in some ways, it’s been a good year.

I can’t say I’m sad to see it end, though.

Moving on to the usual items in this year-end post:

WRITING

As I mentioned yesterday, I wrote a million words—barely—again this year, for the 15th consecutive year. That works out to nine-and-a-half novels and one short story. It’s a very nice achievement, and I’m proud of it, but I’ll be fine with it if I actually manage to cut back next year, as I’ve been threatening to for some time now. There are a lot of other things I need to do, and want to do, that I haven’t been able to because writing that much sucks up so much time.

READING

I read 107 books this year, the second-lowest total since I started keeping records of what I read in 1980. But a lot of them were pretty darned good books. Here are the ten I liked the most, in the order in which I read them:

BUZ SAWYER, VOLUME 1: THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC, Roy Crane
THE OFFICE, Fredric Brown
MADBALL, Fredric Brown
CONAN AND THE LIVING PLAGUE, John C. Hocking
ROBERT E. HOWARD: A LITERARY BIOGRAPHY, David C. Smith
THE STRANGEST SIN, Orrie Hitt
GAMBLING MAN, Clifton Adams
TOUGH AS NAILS: THE COMPLETE CASES OF DONOHUE, Frederick Nebel
SLUGFEST: INSIDE THE EPIC, 50-YEAR BATTLE BETWEEN MARVEL AND D.C., Reed Tucker
BURNED WITH THE COYOTE BRAND, Dan Cushman 

I don’t claim these are “bests”, but they are my favorites from my reading this year.

THE STATE OF THE BLOG

Readership here still isn’t what it once was . . . but what is? It’s enough for me that most of you seem to be enjoying it, I’m still having fun, and so it goes. Thanks to all of you who drop in. I’ll be here.

Halfway Point

I don't normally do middle-of-the-year updates, but this year has seen some changes in both my writing and my reading so I thought I'd mention them.

Halfway through the year, I'm on a pace to write about 900,000 words in 2019. If that holds, my million-words-a-year streak will end at 14. I'm actually all right with that, since I never intended to continue it for this long, anyway. I've already started talking with my editor about my contracts for next year, and it looks like I'll have about 750,000 words to write. Maybe a little more. I maintained that pace for years before I started hitting a million, and I'm confident I can continue at that rate for a good while yet. That's still pretty productive.

Now, it's possible I'll have a good second half and get the million words for this year anyway. We'll see. As long as I'm having fun and turning out good books, I don't care either way, but I'll admit, I've enjoyed being a million-word-a-year guy like the old pulpsters.

In 1980, I started keeping a list of every book I read each year. All those lists from before 2008 were lost in the fire, but I still remember my high and low totals. The most books I read in a year was 184. The fewest, 106. As of right now, I've read 50 books this year. So again, I'm right there in that area where I might not meet an established standard. Or maybe I will. I'd like to read at least 100 books, even if I can't get to 106.

All this is entirely arbitrary and trivial, of course. Utterly meaningless. Probably just a sympton of low-level OCD. But I like lists and keeping track of stuff.

This has been an unusual year in real life, what with Sammy's medical problems (he's doing quite well, by the way), the roof damage, the hassles with the insurance company, finally getting the new roof on, and numerous other time-sucks. But in the past couple of months, my writing seems to be back on track for the most part. Dealing with real life is just part of, well, life.

I have plans for the next year and a half that I'm looking forward to. We'll see what happens.

Correction and an Odd Statistic

In looking over my records of my reading last year, I realized I'd left a book off the list. So actually, I read 116 books in 2018, the exact same number that I read in 2017. I don't know the odds against that.

Today was just a regular writing day, nothing real-life-related to deal with. I finished the chapter I left off in yesterday and wrote another one to go with it. I have three-fourths of this book done and am starting to feel some momentum building toward finishing it off.

The Wrap Up

This has been a year with a considerable amount of bad—the loss of friends and loved ones, ongoing health problems for me and many of those close to me—but also plenty of good, mostly due to the love of friends and family. We hang in there and keep going, and there are good times along the way. And a number of things to report in the areas which this blog addresses most of the time.

WRITING

I reached the million word level again this year for the 14^th year in a row. When I started this streak, I just wanted to see if I could actually write a million words in a year. I had come close the year before, somewhere between 800,000 and 900,000, so it seemed at least possible. Then once I accomplished that, and once the years doing it began to pile up, I just kept going. Ten years seemed like a pretty good goal. When I passed that and made it to 13 years, I didn’t want to stop there. (Yes, I’m that superstitious.) So I had to try to make it again this year, and I did, with a little more than a week to spare. (Gone are the days when I’d hit a million words sometime in October!) Next year, who knows, maybe, maybe not, but I’m in the process of cutting back some on my commitments because there are still things I’d like to do besides sit and pound the keyboard. Although I still love writing, don’t get me wrong about that. Most of my work is published under other names, as has been the case for many years, but I was able to do a few short stories as myself that haven’t seen print yet but will next year. I’m still the luckiest guy I know, to be able to do what I really enjoy and make a living at it.

READING

I read 115 books this year, the usual mix of Westerns, mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, horror, graphic novels, and assorted other stuff. Looking back, I read 116 books last year. I was surprised the total was that close. I’m consistent, if nothing else. More than ever, I’ve retreated into the safe havens of pulps, pulp reprints, and vintage paperbacks and hardbacks, the same sort of stuff I’ve been reading and enjoying for nearly 60 years now. Amazingly enough, I hardly ever reread anything. There’s still more good old stuff out there than I’ll ever get around to reading, but I’m going to try. I do still read new books, too, especially those by friends of mine. Below are the ten books I read this year that I liked the best, in the order in which I read them.

THE BLACK ICE SCORE, Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake)

TERROR INC., Lester Dent

SLEEP WITH THE DEVIL, Day Keene

THE PYTHON PIT, George F. Worts

MR. CALAMITY, Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray)

THE WIDOW, Orrie Hitt

RENEGADE, Ramsey Thorne (Lou Cameron)

THE DOOM LEGION, Will Murray

CASCA: THE ETERNAL MERCENARY, Barry Sadler

ASTOUNDING: JOHN W. CAMPBELL, ISAAC ASIMOV, ROBERT A. HEINLEIN, L. RON HUBBARD, AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION, Alec Nevala-Lee

You can see what I mean about pulps and vintage paperbacks. There are three new books on that list, the two by Will Murray that feature pulp characters, and the non-fiction volume by Alec Nevala-Lee that’s about a pulp, the man who edited it, and the authors who wrote for it. I believe that all ten books on this list are currently in print. I didn’t check on this, so bear with me if I’m wrong on one or two of them. But you can still find copies pretty easily if you want to check out any of them.

MOVIES

Honestly, it was a struggle to find time to watch many movies this year, which led to me participating only sporadically in the Overlooked Movies/TV posts. More next year, perhaps.

THE STATE OF THE BLOG

I started Rough Edges in the summer of 2004 because my friends Bill Crider and Ed Gorman had blogs, and I wanted to try my hand at one, too. In the early days it was mostly a report of mundane things that I did, but gradually book and movie reviews became more prominent, along with music posts and some posts about my work and writing in general.  As mentioned above, in the past year I haven’t written nearly as much about movies, and many weeks there were only Forgotten Books posts and my weekend series about pulps, along with the occasional and semi-autobiographical Monday Memories posts. (I’m already running out of things to write about in those, so expect them to appear less often.)

The really odd thing about this year is that in late October, literally from one day to the next, the daily traffic to the blog dropped by roughly two-thirds. I have no idea why this happened. I realize that with the rise of Facebook and other social media, blogs aren’t nearly as popular as they were a decade ago, but that sudden drop is both baffling and discouraging.

However, just in the past few months, several people have contacted me out of the proverbial blue to tell me how much they enjoy the blog. One fellow said, “I’ve learned a tremendous amount about pulps and genre fiction from reading Rough Edges and enjoyed every minute of it.” As long as I’m accomplishing that, I consider the time very well spent, and if it ever gets to the point where only a dozen people are reading it, as it was in the beginning, well, that’s okay, too, as long as they’re enjoying it. As I’ve said about the WesternPulps mailing list, which has been through E-Groups, One List, Yahoo Groups, and now Groups.io, “I started this group sending messages to myself, and I’ll keep it up until it reaches that point again.” My mother always said I was the most hard-headed person she had ever seen.

So to all of you still with me, thank you for your friendship and interest, and I’ll see you next year. May it be a good one for all of us!

Attention Span

I don't seem to have the attention span to read anything longer than a novella these days. I have some Forgotten Books posts about novels already scheduled, but other than that there may be a lot of posts about anthologies, collections, and pulp "novels" that are actually closer to novellas. I'd already just about given up on reading anything longer than 400 pages, although I'd manage one now and then. Now even a book that's 60-70,000 words seems like too much to tackle. I read on one for a couple of days and get burned out. I've been through stretches like this before, don't know what causes them or how to break out of one, but this time it seems to be settled in for good. At least I'm still reading and I have plenty of shorter stuff on hand. Does this happen to anybody else?

End of a Streak

Today while looking over the list of books I read in 2016, I realized that I didn't read a single library book last year. Not one. My sister took me to the bookmobile for the first time in the fall of 1959, and I'm fairly certain I read at least a few library books every year since then. But now, all my library cards are expired, and with all the books I own, both print and e-books, it's entirely possible I'll never read a library book again. Which is kind of sad.

The Wrap Up

This was a year of being nagged at by lots of little annoyances, mostly health-related, as well as the year one of my best friends, Ed Gorman, passed away. I still halfway expect to get an email from Ed promising me another Maserati is on the way in appreciation for something I did for him, when in truth Ed did more to help me than I ever did for him. More than a hundred Maseratis could ever pay back.

But not to dwell on the bad, 2016 was also a year in which a lot of good things happened. Bill Crider won the Sidewise Award for a story I published in TALES FROM THE OTHERVERSE, and one of my stories was a finalist for the same award. I read a bunch of good books and watched a bunch of good movies and TV shows. I attended my first ice hockey games and discovered that I'm a hockey fan. (Actually, now that I think about it, it may have been right at the end of 2015 when I went to my first game, but it was this year I became a real fan. I even know what icing is!) The world is still a good place and I intend to enjoy it.

Writing

I topped a million words again this year, for the 12^th straight year. I just take it year to year and don't know how much I'll get done in 2017, but based on the contracts I have, I should be in the neighborhood of a million words again. This year it broke down to ten novels, five more novels written in collaboration, and two novellas, both of which will have my name on them when they're published next year. I had a really good first half of the year, then slowed down some in the second half, largely due to my eye problems. Those seem to be under control for now, so I'm optimistic about my production for next year.

Reading

Here are my top ten favorite books I read in 2016, in alphabetical order by author, as usual.

SINNER MAN, Lawrence Block

THE SAVAGE PACK, Fred Blosser

ANGEL'S FLIGHT, Lou Cameron

PISTOL PASSPORT, Eugene Cunningham

A HANDFUL OF HELL, Robert F. Dorr

THE MAN FROM NOWHERE, T.T. Flynn

THE KNIFE SLIPPED, A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)

POWDER SMOKE, William Colt MacDonald

MY FATHER, THE PORNOGRAPHER, Chris Offutt

NIGHTRIDER DEPUTY, Ralph R. Perry

Two that almost made the list are SOME BURIED CAESAR by Rex Stout and A GENT FROM BEAR CREEK by Robert E. Howard. I dropped them off because they were rereads. I also debated with myself whether to include Fred Blosser's THE SAVAGE PACK since I published it, but finally I decided to put it on there because I think it's a great frontier adventure novel. I think I blogged about all of these except the Offutt book, which is fascinating and disturbing and very well-written, and Lou Cameron's ANGEL'S FLIGHT, which I'll be posting about probably next week. I'll say this, though, as a teaser: it's the best book I read in 2016. My reading this year was dominated by Westerns, and pulp Westerns, at that. That should come as no surprise to anyone. I read 111 books in all, down quite a bit from last year's 125. I don't make New Year's Resolutions, but I am going to try to read more next year. Seems like I always say that. We'll see.

So I'll close with a quote from my favorite philosopher (bet you didn't know I have a favorite philosopher), Marcus Aurelius: "When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." Have a great 2017, everyone.

The Wrap Up

READING

I read 127 books this year, a small increase from last year's 116. 77 of them were e-books, so while that makes up the majority of my reading, I still read quite a few print books, too, and I expect that rough split to continue. 33 of the 127 were review copies. I wasn't able to review all the books that were sent to me, but I read and blogged about as many of them as I could and I'm sure some of the others will show up on the blog in the future. 21 of the 127 were books that I edited and published. In looking through the list, I noticed that I didn't read any books published in 2015 by the so-called Big Five. The only new books I read from traditional publishers came from Kensington and Baen, companies that have distribution deals with the Big Five but are independently owned, and there were only a few of those. Everything else I read was either small press, self-published, or decades old. This wasn't intentional. I'm certainly not boycotting the Big Five. But it's an unavoidable fact that they're publishing less and less that I want to take the time to read these days, while there's so much good stuff coming out from those other sources that I couldn't even hope to keep up with it. The important thing to me is that I don't think I'll ever run out of good books to read.

Which brings us to my top ten favorites of the books I read this year, in alphabetical order by author:

LIE CATCHERS, Paul Bishop

THE CRIME OF OUR LIVES, Lawrence Block

THE SHOTGUN RIDER, Peter Brandvold

TARZAN THE TERRIBLE, Edgar Rice Burroughs

THE BIG DRIFT, Patrick Dearen

101 ESSENTIAL TEXAS BOOKS, Glenn Dromgoole and Carlton Stowers

FIRE WITH FIRE, Charles E. Gannon

TURN ON THE HEAT, A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)

RIVER RANGE, L.P. Holmes

WAITING FOR A COMET, Richard Prosch

My short list had 17 books on it, and I could have added another dozen or more that were pretty close. So it wasn't easy getting this list down to 10, but there they are, for what it's worth.

WRITING

As those of you who have read yesterday's post are aware, I wrote just over a million words this year, the 11^th consecutive year I've reached that mark. That breaks down to 12 novels and 7 shorter pieces of fiction, most of them novelette or novella length. Right now my plan is write at least that much in 2016. I'll need to if I'm going to keep up with the projects I've committed to do. It's a lot of hard work, but I'm still having fun so I don't see any reason to stop now.

PUBLISHING

Rough Edges Press continues to occupy a significant portion of my time. With plenty of invaluable technical help from Livia, along with some great covers, REP brought out 9 books in the Blaze! Adult Western series, along with a number of reprints and originals from Stephen Mertz, Ed Gorman, John Hegenberger, James J. Griffin, and David Hardy. We published three original anthologies, the two WEIRD MENACE volumes and the Alternate History anthology TALES FROM THE OTHERVERSE. The Blaze! series will continue in 2016, along with a full slate of original and reprint novels and collections, and we'll also have a big science fiction anthology next summer, if all goes according to plan. More details on that later. UPDATE: I added a picture of all the books REP published in 2015 to the top of the post.

So you can see there's plenty going on to keep me busy. I guess I stay out of trouble that way. Many thanks to those of you who have stuck with the blog for another year. I'll be around.

The Wrap Up

Not to start this on too much of a downer, but it's no secret that on a personal level, 2014 sucked. I don't want to even think about how many friends and loved ones we lost, and far too many people we know went through the same thing. Add in Livia's broken arm and some lingering health issues affecting several people in the family, and you've got a pretty lousy year.

But we're still here, still working, and why dwell on the negative when some good things happened, too?

Like the fact that I wrote more than a million words for the tenth year in a row. This is something I started thinking about several years ago, and I'm very glad that I made it despite the fact that it looked pretty doubtful for a while. Of course, it really doesn't add up to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but it's a nice accomplishment anyway.

In case you're wondering, that million-plus words took the form of thirteen novels and four novellas. That's a good year's work, I think.

I also launched Rough Edges Press, my publishing imprint, this year, and brought out sixteen books and stories, a mixture of reprints and originals that I'm very proud of, and next year should be even better with the impending launch of the BLAZE! Adult Western series and more work from some of the best writers in the business.

Writing, editing, and publishing cut into my reading time, of course, but I still managed to read 116 books this year, and here are my ten favorites, in the order in which I read them:

JASON EVERS: HIS OWN STORY, Frank Roderus – one of the best Western noir novels I've ever read and a beautiful example of the unreliable narrator.

THE YEAR WHEN STARDUST FELL, Raymond F. Jones – from the classic line of science fiction juvenile novels published by Winston, and even though I didn't read it until this year, it's exactly the sort of book that made me a science fiction fan to start with.

HALF A KING, Joe Abercrombie – a gritty heroic fantasy novel with great narrative pace, from an author I really need to read more of.

LIGHTS IN THE DEEP, Brad R. Torgersen – a collection of, once again, the sort of classic science fiction that made me an SF fan.

CANNIBAL GOLD/BLOOD RED TIDE, Chuck Dixon – I have to put these first two volumes in Dixon's SF/adventure series BAD TIMES together, since it's becoming obvious that what he's doing here is writing one gigantic novel. And it's a superb one, too, full of action and interesting ideas.

THE CHAPLAIN'S WAR, Brad R. Torgersen – greatly expanded from two of the stories in LIGHTS IN THE DEEP, this is the rare "fix-up" novel that works spectacularly well.

DOC SAVAGE: THE ICE GENIUS, Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray and Lester Dent) – I've enjoyed all of the new Doc Savage novels I've read so far, but THE ICE GENIUS takes the series to a new level. It satisfies a long-time fan (more than fifty years reading Doc Savage for me!) while at the same time being a classic, sprawling adventure novel of epic scope.

McKENNA'S HOUSE, Robert J. Randisi – a fine private eye yarn and a novel with, as Bob puts it, "a lot of heart". Poignant, well-plotted, with one of the most likable protagonists you'll ever find, this is the best Randisi novel I've ever read.

FORBIDDEN RIVER, Frederick Nebel – a fantastic collection of Northerns from one of the best pulp writers, Frederick Nebel, and one of the best pulp reprint publishers, Tom Roberts of Black Dog Books. This one is pure adventure goodness from start to finish.

I read plenty of other really good books, too, and a lot of comic books and graphic novels I enjoyed. Speaking of comic books, most of the movies I liked wound up on the critics' Worst of the Year lists, but two films I loved that were almost universally well-received are CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER and GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY. They really got it right. I've gotten away from posting about movies except for the Tuesday's Overlooked series, but I'm going to try to do better about that next year and at least mention most of the stuff we watch.

I don't make New Year's Resolutions, but another thing I'm going to try to do in 2015 is spend a little less time on-line and more time reading. I have a lot of books and pulps waiting for me to get to them.

This blog is more than ten years old now, and my sincere thanks to those of you who have been reading it from the first and everyone who has discovered it along the way. I'll close by saying that I hope 2014 wasn't too bad for you, and I really, really hope 2015 will be better for all of us. Happy New Year!

More About 2013's Reading

Last week in my year-end post I mentioned that I'd read 128 books in 2013. If anybody's interested, here's the breakdown in what genres they were:

46 Westerns

25 Graphic Novels

22 Mysteries

10 Science Fiction

7 Horror

7 General Fiction

6 Non-fiction

2 War Novels

2 Romance

1 Humor

As far as formats go, here are those numbers:

Books Read Electronically (e-books, PDFs, Word documents – 66)

Hardbacks – 15

Trade Paperbacks – 30

Paperbacks – 8

Pulps – 6 (although there were probably at least a dozen pulp reprints scattered through the other formats)

I read 14 books that were sent to me as review copies. It seemed like more than that, so I may have overlooked one or two. I read 24 books from libraries. I read multiple books by various authors:

Garth Ennis – 5

Ed Gorman – 5

Frank Roderus – 5

Keith Souter – 5

Robert J. Randisi – 4

Jory Sherman – 4

Lawrence Block – 3

Geoff Johns – 3

I read 2 books by 'way too many authors to list. I've never been the type to go on a binge and read a bunch of books by the same author, though. 5 or 6 is usually the most I'll read by the same author in one year.

The most important thing is that I read a bunch of good books last year. My plan is to do that this year, too.

The Wrap Up

I can't say that I'm sorry to see 2013 go. Livia's mom passed away during the summer, and that loss cast a shadow over much of the rest of the year. But it was also the year we got into the publishing business in a much bigger way, and we bought property down on the Gulf Coast that we hope will someday be a second home for us. Right after Christmas a new dog came to live with us, a big, enthusiastic, affectionate Pyrenees/Shepherd mix we've named Sammy. Mostly it was a year in which there was just never enough time in the day.

So here's a look at how writing and reading went for me this year.

Writing

I topped a million words again this year (good) but my output dropped again for the third or fourth year in a row (frustrating). I finished the year with 5312 pages, which is down about a thousand pages from my best year ever. I'm still shooting for a million words again next year to make it ten years in a row, but if I don't make it...well, three-quarters of a million, or whatever it turns out to be, will just have to be enough. This year's output was all novels, 13 of them, no short stories for a change. Two of those novels (WEST OF THE BIG RIVER: THE LAWMAN and DANCING WITH DEAD MEN) even had my name on them, and both were well received, which is very gratifying.

Reading

Here are my ten favorites from the books I've read this year, in the order in which I read them:

MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY, Sean Howe (as a Marvel fan for more than 50 years, this was great fun, as well as telling me a lot of things I didn't know)

THE LAST RIDE and THE VULTURES OF WHAPETON, Robert E. Howard (I reread these two Howard collections before I wrote the introduction to WESTERN TALES, published by the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press)

SGT. PIGGY'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB COMIC, Stephan Pastis (a massive collection of one of my favorite comic strips, PEARLS BEFORE SWINE)

I TRAVEL BY NIGHT, Robert R. McCammon (a new historical horror yarn by an old favorite, and a lot of fun)

WEST OF THE BIG RIVER: THE ARTIST, Jackson Lowry (Robert E. Vardeman) (all the WEST OF THE BIG RIVER books have been good, but this tale of Charles M. Russell before he was a famous artist is the best of the bunch)

THE MASKED INVASION, Curtis Steele (Frederick C. Davis) (the first novel in the Operator #5 pulp series; man, I had a good time reading this one)

CONAN AND THE EMERALD LOTUS, John C. Hocking (the best Conan story by anybody other than Robert E. Howard I've ever read, hands down)

SADDLES, SIXGUNS & SHOOTOUTS, Charles Beckman Jr. (Charles Boeckman) (a great collection of stories from the Western pulps by one of the few surviving genuine pulp authors)

THE BURGLAR WHO COUNTED THE SPOONS, Lawrence Block (Bernie Rhodenbarr is back, and one of the best writers ever is at the top of his game)

As a bonus, here are three books not even out yet that you need to remember so you can grab them later on:

BULLETS IN THE BLACK, Walt Coburn (I got to read it ahead of time because I wrote the intro; it includes some of Coburn's best work)

THE SOUL OF A REGIMENT, Talbot Mundy (another collection that's in the works for which I wrote the introduction)

MIDNIGHT ROAD, Jada Davis (another almost lost hardboiled masterpiece from Davis, and a fine coming-of-age novel at the same time)

I read 128 books this year, up a little from last year, but it's worth noting that the total includes 30 books I edited and/or proofread for Rough Edges Press, Western Fictioneers, and Prairie Rose Publications. That might have something to do with my own writing output going down, even though I tried to do all the editorial work after I'd gotten my own pages for the day. It does take some mental energy, though.

I have no idea how many movies we watched. Quite a few, although I didn't blog about many of them except the ones featured in the Tuesday's Overlooked Movies series. Maybe one of these years I'll at least keep a list of them. Or maybe not.

I hope all of you enjoy whatever celebrating you do tonight and that 2014 is happy, healthy, and prosperous for everyone reading this.

Favorite Reading Spots

Some of you have expressed a tolerance for these nostalgia-laden, semi-autobiographical posts, so here's another one. I think one thing most of us have in common is that we're avid readers and probably always have been. Over the years you've probably had some special spots where you read a lot and have fond memories of them because of that. I've already written about how I enjoyed reading in Study Hall when I was in high school. Here are some other favorite places of mine to crack a book or a comic.

When I was a kid my parents had a low-slung, upholstered rocking chair that was always my favorite place to sit and read. It was next to a window in the living room, so there was good light, and it just seemed to fit me. For most of the years I sat in it, it was covered in some sort of cream-colored naugahyde-like stuff. Next to it was a record cabinet (for those of you who remember records) and when I got back from my weekly trip to the drugstore with the stack of comic books I'd bought, I would sit down in that rocking chair, sort the comics in the order I wanted to read them, saving my favorites for last, and not get up until I'd read through the entire stack.

The same drugstore where I bought my comics also carried a few digest magazines, and I remember reading issues of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. MAGAZINE in that chair. I could read the entire U.N.C.L.E. novella in the current issue in one sitting, between the time I got home from school and supper (which was always at six o'clock on the dot). Then I'd read the back-up stories the next afternoon. I also recall sitting down in that rocker one Sunday afternoon, after church and Sunday dinner, with the Bantam paperback of THE THOUSAND-HEADED MAN, one of the early Bantam reprints of the Doc Savage novels and the second one I read after METEOR MENACE. Again, I didn't get up until I'd read that entire paperback. I'm thinking I ought to reread it, if I can ever find the time.

One other thing I liked about that rocker: if you rocked hard enough in it, you could tip it over backward. I never got hurt doing that, but my mother hated it. Years later, after I had kids, my mother still had that same chair, and I taught the girls the trick. My mother still hated it. I told her that if she ever got rid of the rocker, I wanted it. Well, she got rid of it, all right, but she wouldn't tell me what she did with it. I suspect she didn't want me to have it because she was afraid the girls would hurt themselves tipping it over. And maybe she was right.

Of course there were other places in my parents' house where I read a lot, including my bed, where I would prop pillows behind me and sit up half the night reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and classic mysteries (John Dickson Carr's THE THREE COFFINS comes to mind, along with a number of Ellery Queen novels) and the summer between eighth and ninth grades, all three Lord of the Rings novels. At some point I got an actual recliner in my room, and that was where I read THE MALTESE FALCON, THE BIG SLEEP, THE MAN FROM DEL RIO, and lots and lots of comic books.

Another of my favorite places to read was a lounge chair on our front porch, as long as the weather was nice, of course. I read more Burroughs there, along with several novels by Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov's THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY (in the fat Science Fiction Book Club omnibus edition that some of you probably remember). I laughed my head off reading Richard S. Prather's Shell Scott novel STRIP FOR MURDER. (Those of you who have read it know the scene that set me off.) I read some mainstream fiction there, too, including a volume of Ben Hecht's short stories, some Irwin Shaw, THE MAGUS by John Fowles, and a book that was a bestseller at the time (forgotten today, of course) THE SECRET OF SANTA VITTORIA.

A couple of doors down the street was a rent house that my parents owned, and for a while my sister and brother-in-law lived there. I hung out there quite a bit and usually had a book with me. It was on the front porch of that house I read Mickey Spillane's ONE LONELY NIGHT. My brother-in-law had a shelf of science fiction novels I raided, so there was still more Burroughs and Heinlein, along with E.E. "Doc" Smith and A.E. van Vogt.

Along in those same years, I spent a lot of time at my aunt's house in the tiny Texas town of Blanket, not far from Brownwood. Some of you know exactly where that is, and no doubt you also know that there's not much to do in Blanket. I had a transistor radio and stacks and stacks of books. I read the great comic novel RHUBARB by H. Allen Smith. I read a bunch of Larry and Streak and Nevada Jim Westerns by "Marshall McCoy", really Len Meares, who became a good friend by correspondence years later. I read the Lancer editions of the Conan stories by Robert E. Howard (complete with the meddling of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, but I didn't understand that until years later, either). While at the grocery store in Brownwood, I bought copies of FLINT by Louis L'Amour and THE SPY IN THE OINTMENT by Donald E. Westlake. A trip to the drugstore in Comanche, a dozen miles the other direction from Blanket, yielded an issue of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. digest magazine that featured "The Pillars of Salt Affair", actually written by Bill Pronzini under the Robert Hart Davis house-name. Years later, the one time I met Pronzini, I told him how much I enjoyed reading that story in a big brown armchair in my aunt's house. On a similar note, I recall reading one of Edward S. Aarons' Sam Durrell novels, ASSIGNMENT—SCHOOL FOR SPIES, while I was there. Then, somewhere during that stretch, I met the girl who lived across the street from my aunt and afterwards spent less time reading, but it probably says something about me that I remember all those authors and titles but have absolutely no recollection of her name.

Eventually I went off to college, spending a year at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos (it's now just Texas State) and then finishing my degree at North Texas State University in Denton (now the University of North Texas). At SWTSU I read a bunch of Doc Savage and Nick Carter novels, many of which my roommate borrowed and read as well. I lived in a dorm for one year at NTSU, had an apartment in Denton for a year, and commuted for a year, plus the two summer sessions it took me to finish up. I still read a bunch of comics, and it was along in here that I started reading the Executioner series as well, going through them as fast as I could lay my hands on them. I remember reading a number of Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm novels while I lived in the apartment. While I was commuting, my home-away-from-home became the NTSU library, particularly an isolated corner where a dozen or so study carrels were located behind the stacks where thousands of bound periodicals were shelved. I sat in one of those carrels between classes with food I had snuck in and whatever paperback I was reading, often one of the Jove reprints of a Shadow novel with a cover by Jim Steranko. The library had some of the early trade paperback collections of classic comic strips like DICK TRACY and TERRY AND THE PIRATES, and I'd get those off the shelves and read them as well.

Of course, that area was designed for studying, which I also did . . . very occasionally. It's a wonder I ever made it through college. But hey, when you stop and think about it, I was studying. I just didn't know it.

Later I grew up (sort of), got married, and had daughters who wanted to go to dance class and Girl Scouts. I spent a lot of hours sitting in various vehicles outside of various buildings waiting for them, and of course you know how I passed the time. With pulps, and Dean Koontz novels, and science fiction digests. (I was on my great hiatus from comics by then.) The Girl Scout troops met in the local community center and the parking lot wasn't lit well enough to read by during the winter months when it was dark by the time we'd get there. So I took a little battery-powered light with me and held it over the book with one hand while I turned the pages with the other hand. Sometimes it was cold enough that I had to wear gloves. Sure, I probably could have gone into the building and found some place warm and well-lighted to sit and wait, but I got to where I enjoyed being out there in the car, huddled in a coat, a little island of light in a dark parking lot, just me and my books. I'm sure people thought I was crazy. But I'll bet a few of you understand.

Now I read mostly on the sofa in our living room. As I write this, my Kindle, a trade paperback collection of some Western pulp stories, and a magazine are waiting there beside it for me. Here in my office there's a stack of comics three feet to my left, within reach if I lean over a little between chapters in the current manuscript. To my right is a low bookcase full of research books, but stacked in front of it so that I have to move them occasionally are a couple of stacks of pulp reprints from Black Dog Books and Altus Press and some trade paperback comic book collections. On top of the bookcase is a small stack of library books (a mystery novel and two old Westerns). If I turn my chair around, I'm facing eight sets of metal shelves (four pairs set back to back) completely full of double-stacked paperbacks. On the tops of those shelves are big stacks of hardbacks and trade paperbacks, and there's another set of metal shelves full of hardbacks and trade paperbacks stuck in a corner, along with two six-foot-high stacks of unshelved hardbacks and trade paperbacks. Now, as I look around, I spot a bag of paperbacks I bought at one of the stores down at the coast this past summer that I've never gotten around to putting on the shelves. And this is after losing everything in the fire and starting over less than six years ago. If I never buy another book, I'll never get around to reading all the ones I have.

But what a sad world it would be if I never bought another book. There are bound to be more good reading spots out there, just waiting for me to discover them.