MARK MORRIS

I can't believe it's a year since I posted my last Happy New Year message. These past 12 months have flown by. Ulcerated eyeball aside, 2007 turned out to be a very good year for me. I spent the first month of it finishing off my novel, The Deluge, which was subsequently published by Leisure (US) in December. Then, after a great 2-night trip to BBC Wales in Cardiff to see early rough-cuts of the first 3 episodes of series 3 of Doctor Who (where I met 2 fellow writers, Paul Magrs and Mark Michalowski, who have since become great friends), I embarked on my Doctor Who novel, Forever Autumn, which was an absolute joy to write, and which was published in September to generally very good reviews. The rest of the year was spent writing my Hellboy novel, The All-Seeing Eye, which will be published by Dark Horse later this year, preparing the new edition of my second novel, Stitch, which was re-released by Humdrumming in September, and promoting Forever Autumn on a massively enjoyable and successful nationwide signing tour with my fellow Doctor Who authors, the aforementioned Paul and Mark. Half-way through this tour, towards the end of September, I attended the British Fantasy Convention, where I won my first British Fantasy Award for Cinema Macabre, the anthology of horror movies essays which I conceived and edited, and which was published by PS Publishing in 2006.

So what will 2008 bring? Well, work-wise, I'm as madly busy as ever. I delivered Hellboy: The All-Seeing Eye on December 23rd, which as I say will be published later in 2008, and I now have 3 further books to complete and deliver by the end of April. One is a novella for Earthling Publications in the US, entitled It Sustains, one is an adaptation of a previously published novella of mine, Stumps, for Barrington Stoke, who published my novella The Dogs some years ago, and the other one I'm not allowed to talk about until contracts have been signed and an official announcement has been made.

After that little lot is out of the way, I'll be re-writing a novel which has been sitting in my bottom drawer for a year or so, and in which a publisher is currently showing interest, and then will no doubt be preparing the new edition of my 1994 novel, The Secret of Anatomy, which Humdrumming are planning to launch at FantasyCon this year.

I also have various other projects - some concrete, some not - on the boil, news of which will no doubt leak out in the fullness of time.

I'm planning on attending Alt.Fiction in Derby again this year, which takes place in April, FantasyCon in Nottingham in September, and hopefully the World Fantasy Convention in Calgary, Canada, in November.

Before I go, a quick list of my faves of 2007.

Favourite movie (seen in the cinema): This is England

Favourite book (I read 41 books in 2007, so I'm going to choose a few): The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Grin of the Dark by Ramsey Campbell, Ferocity by Stephen Laws, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami and Fangland by John Marks. Look out also for Sarah Pinborough's superb novella, The Language of Dying, which will be published by PS in 2008, and which is easily the best thing she's ever written.

Favourite TV show: Well, it has to be Doctor Who, but I also saw the last 9 episodes of The Sopranos this year, which I thought were absolutely superb. If you've never watched The Sopranos, do yourself a favour and go get the entire 6 series on DVD. It's a masterpiece of the visual medium. An absolute classic series.

OK, better shoot. Off to see I Am Legend tonight.

Cheers for now
Mark