Around this time every year, just like most of the other bloggers and authors, I find myself musing about the future, and the past. I did it last year and the year before, and looking at those posts… well. (When 2016 began this site wasn’t running.) Not a lot of what I plotted came to pass, for various reasons. Some of those same reasons apply to this post only popping up at the end of January rather than the beginning, but still.
It’s even harder to contemplate the future than it was a year ago, or two years ago. No matter how much an author, particularly an author of feelgood, escapist, enjoyable fiction, might want to live in a happy little bubble, thinking only of the next orgasm, the chaotic clusterfuck happening all around is getting harder and harder to ignore. Maniacs are in positions of power and no one seems to know how to shunt them aside, the warping and twisting of public opinion by manipulated algorhythms appears unstoppable; the rise and rise of rightwing shitbags, violent nationalism and vicious, wilful ignorance is not slowing down either.
Planning anything major almost seems foolhardy, particularly for anyone living in the UK, because we just don’t know where we’re going to be, what we’re going to do, what we’re going to be able to do by the time summer rolls along. OK, it’s possible to disregard some of the most spectacular bullshit, such as the idea that we’ll all be under martial law whether Brexit happens or not, just because whichever side ‘loses’ will have an epic tantrum 
and take to the streets. It’s probably not all going to end up with zombies, either. (You may, if you wish, add in your own joke here about how the zombies already walk among us and are in fact running the show.)
I want to have hope. I want to anticipate that some of my plans and schemes will work out. I even have, for probably the first time ever, a long-term goal. For most of 2018, Dirty Sexy Words has stepped up the bookselling side, with more fetish markets and events than I’d attended in the last three years put together. Most of it’s been fun, a lot of it’s been inspiring and some of it actively lucrative, to the extent it’s at least possible to believe that it will continue to bring in beer money.
There’s a new book project in the wings as well, about which more later. A lot more, later: you won’t be able to miss hearing about this one once it gets underway. And it’s not long till Eroticon, either. It’s worth trying, still. It’s worth believing there’s a potential future that isn’t darkness and despair. There are more orgasms to be had, more books to read, more evenings of laughing helplessly with your mates, more songs to sing.
And I have a whole anthology to edit.