Suburban Killbot Year 2

Another year already? I guess it’s time to take a look back at what I’ve accomplished. Let’s start with the writing stuff. At the end of the last ‘blog year’ I put out my first ebook – The Great Journey – a speculative sci-fi novella. It was followed by three more novellas, each part of a single series – Zero Sample. TGJ was something of a writing exercise, a chance to try a different tone and style, and ZS was a similar piece of experimentation, a contemporary sci-fi with a psychological twist. I’m planning on doing another edit of these soon (nothing major, just a small polish here and there) followed by a free promotion, hopefully to attract some more reviews. Getting downloads isn’t too tricky, but reviews are another matter.

Although I don’t think I’ve mentioned it on here before, I was signed up to a literary agency in the US for a time, but that didn’t quite work out the way I’d hoped. After little success trying to approach publishers myself, I eventually signed with a new, local agency – Broadland Literary. They’ve been fantastic. Two of my novels, the YA TLDK and the MG SOV are now in the hands of some of the best UK/US publishers. They’ve both attracted a lot of interest, but it’s a long process and we’re only on the first step of a very tall ladder.

Which takes me to my other major writing project this year – TSOTS, the sequel to TLDK. Although we’ve not sold TLDK yet, the time felt right for TSOTS. TLDK was written a couple of years ago now, so I’ve been itching to get back to the world and characters. The great thing about writing the sequel was being able to enrich the world in a way that simply wasn’t possible in TLDK. With the core foundations of the setting now established, I had the freedom to build upon and expand the world. It’s been great, and I’m really pleased with the completed draft.

So let’s move onto my other passion – video games! Last year I did an image showcasing 12 games, one for every month. This year I decided to do something a little different, so I took every game I’ve scored an 8 or above and compiled them into the single image below.

These are all my top rated games since starting this blog. Although all these games scored an 8 or above (with the exception of The Stanley Parable, which I didn’t actually rate but felt was worthy of inclusion) that doesn’t mean games scored under an 8 aren’t worth checking out. Hell, some of them I’ve really enjoyed but only given a 6/10 to.

So shall we break down those stats? There were 33 reviews this year, compared to 37 last year. Of those 70 games, only 7 scored a 9/10 and 13 an 8/10. These (plus Stanley) are the games in the image above. I plan to expand this image next year with additional top rated titles, provided any pop up, of course. As I may have mentioned before, there’s very little coming out this year that interests me. There’s Dark Souls 2, out now, but I’ve not got it yet as I’ve been too busy. There’s also Watch_Dogs, although I have my fears about that. One game that did catch my attention though is Child of Light, which I bought on a whim and have really been enjoying. We’ll see how it goes.