Today is my birthday, and I’ve always sort of treated 6th January as my own New Year. No New Year’s Resolutions begin until the 7th, and I have freedom to eat as much banoffee pie as I can until midnight tonight.

It’s also the day that I tend to look back at the previous year, and forward to the year ahead. It’s been a while since I blogged on here, so I thought I’d start back with a recap of how things went for me in 2018, then come back in a day or two and follow-up with a look forward to 2019. I’ve split this post into two parts. Part 1 is below. Part 2 will be here on the 8th.

2018 was something of a mixed bag for me. Professionally it was good, with plenty of goals reached and ambitions achieved. Things weren’t so great on a personal level though, and the year was filled with the deaths of far too many friends and family members.

But, I’ll come back to that in a later post. Today we’re celebrating the good stuff as I look back at some of my professional highs of last year.

January
Not a lot happened in January, really. Obviously, it was my birthday on the 6th, and I reached the grand old age of 40. I think I had cake, although it’s quite a while ago now, so I’m not 100% certain. One thing I did do in January was speak at a big publishing event in London, where I got to meet some pretty amazing authors from all over the world, so that was nice.

Another thing that happened in January was that I gave away the first Space Team book for free for a few days, and for a full 24 hours it was the most-downloaded book on every English-language Amazon store in the world (US, UK, Canada & Australia). That was also nice. Arguably even nicer than the London thing, because it didn’t involve me getting stuck doing loops on a section of the M4 Motorway, gradually losing my mind as I continuously missed the exit for my hotel.

February
The year kicked into high gear in February with the release of Space Team: The Time Titan of Tomorrow, the eighth book in the series, which introduced readers to Tim the Time Titan and new villain, Geronimus Krone. It also saw Cal and Splurt create a special holiday – Smashdown Day – which turned out to be nowhere near as interesting as they’d hoped it might be. If you haven’t picked up a copy of this book yet you can, of course, get it on Amazon.

Also in February, the fourth and final book in my Beaky Malone series of kids books was published in the UK. Illustrated by the amazing Katie Abey, it neatly brought an end to Beaky’s adventures. You can find out all about it here.

March
Another month, another new book. March saw the release of “Dead in the Water”, the third (and possibly final) book in the Dan Deadman Space Detective series. I did love writing about the adventures of Dan, Artur and Ollie, and while I have no immediate plans to bring those guys back for another book, I’m not going to rule it out quite yet.

This book was the tenth set in my Space Team Universe, if you don’t count any of the short stories, and set up a crossover event for later in the year.

April
There were no new books from me in April, but I did have some comics published by Titan Comics based on the SuperMansion animated series starring Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) and Chris Pine (Star Trek). A four-part mini-series, the stories were published in two double-sized volumes, with the first coming out in April and issue two published in May.

I’ve written lots of comics for the UK market before (The Beano, DC SuperHero Girls, Angry Birds and others), but this was my first attempt at writing for the US market. It’s not the best-known show in the world, and I don’t think sales of the comic were exactly stellar, but the scripts were enough to land me a gig writing an episode of the show. More on that later!

SuperMansion #1. Art by Jake Elphick.

May
The third Space Team trilogy concluded in May with Space Team: The King of Space Must Die. The ninth book in the series was a crossover event featuring most of the major characters who appeared throughout the series, plus the main characters from the Dan Deadman series. It was the biggest, most ambitious Space Team book yet, and I was terrified it was going to turn out an unreadable mess. Thankfully, it wasn’t. Not quite. (Although it was touch and go for a while).

Much as I enjoyed writing the book, I was determined to make the next few books in the series a little less epic, and focus on smaller stakes for a while. Not much smaller stakes, granted, but a bit.

Oh, and if you haven’t read this one, you can find it here.

May also saw the release of a series of short animated episodes I wrote for Dreamworks TV. Kip Van Creepy: Delivery Boy was released on the Dreamworks TV app on Amazon Prime Video. It’s currently only available in the US, but if you have Amazon Prime you can watch it with a free Dreamworks TV trial.

June
June was a pretty momentous month for me, mostly because words that came out of my head were spoken by Bryan Cranston, Chris Pine, and lots of other talented actors when my SuperMansion episode, ‘Brokeback Saturn’ was aired on Sony’s streaming service, Crackle, in the US. I’m going to do a video blog about exactly how this ended up happening, but let’s just say it involved a string of lucky breaks and coincidences, and some very nice people.

If you haven’t seen SuperMansion yet, you should really try to check it out. Here’s the trailer for Season 3 (the one I wrote for) and you can buy the Blu-Ray of Season 1 here.

That’s it for the first part of this round-up. So far, 2018 has included 4 books, 2 comic-book issues, and a total of 7 animation episodes. Not bad for six months, eh? Check out Part Two to see what the second half of the year brought.

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