Considering 2010

The other day on twitter I described 2010 as one of the hardest years of my life and also one of the most rewarding. This is starting as a somewhat personal post and this being a book blog I will take no offense if you skip straight to the bottom where I run through a few of the changes to the blog over the last year and focus on the bookish stuff.

http://www.marvelouskreations.com

So this year my marriage fell apart. See, I told you it was personal. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, the timing was off or outside influences brought things to a head instead of letting them grow out over the years, or maybe we were just too quick to say ‘yes, this is for us’ when we met. Regardless it was an amicable split, we remain friends. I am returning to using my maiden name Wearing, we lunch on sundays if we are both home and there are no hard feelings. The year running up to the split though has in many ways been hellish.

 

As a result I’ve read dramatically less than last year, relied far more heavily on the team, and indeed increased it’s size, to keep things moving on Un:Bound and I got away as much as possible. That's a salient point, I promise.

So how exactly has dealing with the stress and unhappiness at home and the additional pressures of endless reviews at work turned out to be a good thing? Well, for starters I finally began to take control of my life, I’m ending 2010 on my own and the happiest and healthiest I have been for many years. I have to put this in the win column. Frankly just the fact that I continued to get out of bed and go to work every day would go in the win column. 

Also, I really threw myself into the blog. I was struggling to focus on reading but there were plenty of other things I could be doing. I attended numerous events this year, throwing myself into the Con circuit and getting Un:Bound closely involved in Alt.Fiction. I met some incredible people and developed some wonderful friendships.I said yes to every invitation to guest blog, podcast or record for archives that came my way and dragged other people into the chaos with me.

The site has grown, the team has grown and my life is inarguably richer for it. 2010, for all that is has been a bitch of a year has seen the set up for some really exciting times ahead. I have to say a huge thanks to all the people who have listened and supported and forgiven and just been there over the last year, the genre world is full of incredible, supportive people (you know who you are) and I’m proud to be a part of it. I’m also endlessly proud of and grateful for the awesome Un:Bound team for all their efforts keeping me and the site running over this last year. I absolutely could not do any of this without them and they push me constantly to keep trying new things and moving forward with the site.

So focussing on the book stuff, what have we been up to this year.

Well, the team has expanded somewhat over the year with people being press ganged into service after making the mistake of having a conversation with me or being volunteered by other people who thought I could make use of them. Un:Bound sometimes has a slight Tar Pit effect, it doesn’t matter how much you struggle once you’ve dipped a toe you are never getting free! The team page will tell you who we all are and where else you can find us.

We started working with Alt.Fiction this year, doing an eight hour podcastathon at the festival and continuing on with them after that. In fact we are so involved we have given them their own page on Un:Bound. You will also notice Podcasts are on the flyers already for the 2011 main event and yup, that’s us again. I'm really excited about having the podcasting stream again.

We also did our first video interview, with the brilliant Rob Shearman, and then ended up recording the BFS awards ceremony, which led in a winding way to the creation of Video Editions which is a hugely exciting project for us. UBVE #1 went live in December and although the full episodes will be roughly quarterly there will be plenty of additional content available during the course of the year through the UBVE site.

The video archive will include everything posted on our the unboundblogzine youtube channel in addition to the actual show footage so you can find the 2010 BFS awards there too.

Young & Un:Bound got a new look and a few more reviewers and books also went

out to the Wave reporters through Citizens Eye. When reviews start coming in

from the group of 14 – 25yr olds who produce the Wave youth newspaper with the

Leicester Mercury it’s going to be an exciting development stage for Un:Bound’s

youth site.

Events wise we attended a fair few and rounded up coverage of more, all of which you can find on our Events page. If you have covered an event we don’t have listed let us know, we are seeking to develop this side of the site and link to bloggers internationally so fans can explore the Con circuit worldwide.

We’ve had the usual round of articles and guest posts and the various regular or semi regular items: Ravenous Wednesday’s, Writer Wednesday’s, Uncovered and Writers Reading all of which are set to continue in 2011. Of course we have continued our regular interviews and there will be no change to that, we love chatting to people about their books and whatever else pops into my head so look out for those, there will be more of a mix of written, audio and video interviews in the coming year than

ever before.

So a big year for us as a site and for the blogosphere as a whole, everyone seems to be changing, numerous bloggers branching out and taking on new challenges.

Sharon Ring of Dark Fiction Review and Del Lakin Smith of Wordpunk have combined forces (of evil) to produce Dark Fiction Magazine, an anthology of short stories from wonderful writers and delivered by fantastic readers. Sharon has also become an agent. Meanwhile The Tattooed Head, Simon Marshall Jones has launched Spectral Press offering novella’s from the likes of Gary McMahon. Angry Robot have launched a short story site, perfect for those of us who never go any where without an iphone and Alt.Fiction has moved to a year round programme of genre fic events including story performances and writing weekends.

Gav of Nextread has closed his doors and now reviews for My Favourite Books and no doubt we will see him turning up around and about over the next year or so. Escape Pod is under the new management of the mighty Mur Lafferty and Alasdair Stuart has taken over the editing the reviews. Several bloggers are working officially in the publishing industry now, including James from Speculative Horizons (also closed, remaining as an archive) and Amanda from Floor to Ceiling Books. The genre blogosphere is stretching out and seeing what it can do, I suspect 2011 will be an exciting year as more of us experiment and get involved in new projects.

I’ve probably missed a lot of exciting stuff that has happened over the year, so please add your own highlights from 2010 and your news in the comments and well done if you made it this far, I have rambled on rather.