Best-of-the-year lists and award-nomination lists are fun to talk about and it’s awfully nice to have your work appear on them. But these lists are also valuable reminders that we have diverse tastes and that our reasons for reading — and for choosing what we read — are all very different. And I think it can be interesting to take note of what’s not on these lists.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading this year, some of it 2015 books, and some books from earlier years. Several months ago I posted about Claire North’s 2014 novel The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which was one of the best novels I’ve read in recent times. Ignore the cover. Seriously. And read it. After I finished, I was amazed at how little I’d heard about this book, and that it had not put in an appearance on either the Hugo or Nebula ballots. (It did win the John W. Campbell Memorial award.)

I just finished another 2014 novel, City of Stairs, by Robert Jackson Bennett, which is also a terrific book that, in retrospect, I am surprised I didn’t see on 2014 award ballots. (Yes, there were complications with the Hugos, but not with the Nebulas! And it may have been on best-of-the-year lists, last year, I don’t know.)

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Since 2011, I’ve been publishing a list of my writing goals for the year, and at the end of the year I take a look at that list and assess how I did at meeting those goals. So it’s time to assess 2015.

I want to start by saying that in 2014 I had some lofty goals — and I failed to meet several of them. So in 2015 I scaled down my ambitions. Here’s how I did:

1. Revise and polish the third novel of THE RED trilogy so that it’s ready for publication.

Yes. Done. And Going Dark has been published!

2. Write at least one novella set in an existing story world.

Nope! As I mentioned last year, I really want to write a novella. I still do. I like the idea of a complete, fully developed, novel-like story that can be read in just a few sessions, and I even know what story I want to write. Maybe in 2016.

I’ve only ever written one novella, “Goddesses,” which is available in my short fiction collection of that name.

3. Write at least two short stories unrelated to anything else I’ve done.

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For those of you who like to nominate for the annual science fiction and fantasy awards, including the Nebula and Hugo awards, here’s a roundup of my 2015 award-eligible work.

In the short story category…

“The Way Home” is a military fantasy story that reads like science fiction. It belongs to the subgenre known as “portal stories” in which ordinary people pass through some sort of portal to an extraordinary world. Bluntly, I think this is one of the best short stories I’ve ever written. I like its structure, its characterization, and its compactness — it contains an action story with multiple characters in only 6,300 words. Since I tend to write long, I take the latter as a personal victory. All that said, the story has garnered very little interest. So judge for yourself! “The Way Home” was reprinted at Lightspeed Magazine where it’s available to read free online.

In the novel category…

The Trials
book 2
The Red Trilogy

Going Dark
book 3
The Red Trilogy

The books in The Red Trilogy are fast-paced, near-future, high-tech science fiction thrillers. The Trials continues the story begun in the Nebula and Campbell-nominated The Red, and Going Dark completes that story.

A short history for those of you new to The Red Trilogy: The Red was originally self-published in 2013. It was republished by Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press this past June, with The Trials following in August, and Going Dark released in November.

Edit: this sale price is no longer available. As of this writing, the ebook of The Trials (and also of The Red) is on sale at most ebook vendors for $1.99, so if you’re interested, this is a great time to pick them up.

Edit: For the month of February 2016, the Saga Press ebook editions of all volumes in The Red Trilogy are priced at $2.99 each.

SFWA members: ebook and PDF editions of all three volumes of The Red Trilogy are available for download in the SFWA Forum. Once you’re logged in, you can find them by following this link.

That’s it! Thanks for stopping by.