Exactly one year ago today I started writing this blog. Not many people noticed because I did not allow it to be picked up by the search engines for some time after that. I had tried maintaining a blog on several occasions in the past and always given up after a few posts. I wanted to see if I could produce posts on a regular schedule before risking public failure again. I wrote a few, decided it was not too difficult and pushed on. The very first post I wrote was a very short response to seeing Game of Thrones. I followed this up with a number of posts about Linux which I was seriously considering moving to for work purposes. 

Over the year I have had roughly 37000 hits and seem to have settled down to getting about 4000 to 5000 hits a month these days. That’s more than I expected. 

It’s been an interesting year in more ways than one. I announced the birth of my son, William Karel here just before Christmas. I wrote about Blood of Aenarion, my first fantasy novel for Black Library in almost eight years which was released last Christmas. It was nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award and is on the short list even as we speak. (You can vote in this round here.) I’ve written about the small triumphs and setbacks of my self-publishing venture. 

To begin with I tried to follow the advice of assorted blogging gurus and post three times a week. I confess I found it more than a little difficult to keep up with while writing novels at the same time. I slowed down in January after my 100th post. According to my WordPress installation this will be my 127th post, which is pretty good going, working out at  just under  2.5 a week. 

The subtitle of the blog is Warhammer, Writing and Whatever Else Is On My Mind. I did write a lot about Warhammer which was pretty inevitable, mostly about Elves and Macharius.I wrote a fair bit about writing as well. 

 I did not foresee that I would end up writing so much about e-books. At the time I had no real idea how much those were going to change my view of publishing. One of the reasons I have written so much about them is because they did. We are living through an era of great changes in the industry, certainly the largest of my lifetime. It has been fun to look on and comment on this. The two most popular posts on the blog were concerned with the nuts and bolts of self-publishing.

I expected to write a lot more about gaming both pen and paper and computer games, in particularly massively multi-player online games which have been a hobby of mine for a number of years now. Hopefully in the upcoming year I will get to write a bit more about World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2 which I am looking forward to enormously. I may do some reviews of pen and paper games when I have the time. 

The five most popular posts have been:

1) Create Your Own E-Book Cover

2) Create Your Own Kindle E-Book

3) The E-Book Experiment: Six Month Report 

4) High Elves, Dark Elves, All Elves

5) The Fastest Book I Ever Wrote

The last of those was not written by me but was a guest post from my old friend Matt Forbeck.

I would have liked to finish this post with a look forward towards what I am planning for the next year. However, it’s the nature of blogs that you tend to respond to what’s going on in your life and the world around you and if I knew what was going to happen I would be making my living as a prophet not a writer. There’s that old saying, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. It is a wise one so I’ll just take this opportunity to thank you for reading this and I hope you’ll be doing so again in another year.