Sunday 18 December 2022

A Year In Numbers ... 12!

For 9 of the last 12 years I've said: "It has been a very good 20** all told!".

2020 & 2021 & 2022... hmmm ... Not so much. My books have done fine, but I've spent the sizeable majority of December in hospital with my youngest daughter which is never much fun. She decided that things like breathing and maintaining a measureable body temperature weren't for her. She's been improving slowly though and we hope to be out of here before Chrismas day. In a touching move a group on my Patreon discord clubbed together and sent a care package for me and Celyn, thoughtfully including gifts for my wife, cat, and dog too!

This post follows up from similar posts at the same time in 2021202020192018201720162015201420132012 and 2011 I record a year of ups and less ups. I take a minute to do the sums and raid the scrapbook.

I've now had my Patreon for more than a year and it has been great fun so far. It's a platform that allows readers to support authors directly and encourages more exchange. I've done loads of chapter critques, sent out 50+ signed books as prizes, tuckerised a bunch of people. We have a Discord that gets a lot of chat, and each Patreon tier comes with perks, which can be anything from book plates, and free stories, to free signed books and writing consults. I currently have 113 patrons - many thanks!

Since King of Thorns turned 10 this year, I'll be doing a smidgen of looking in the rear view mirror.

The Girl And The Moon came out in 2022, finishing the Book of the Ice trilogy, and reaching out to connect to all my other work so far.   

 


May 2023 sees an entirely new trilogy start - The Library Trilogy begins with The Book That Wouldn't Burn.

I can't share the (human drawn) covers yet - so here's a AI art placeholder.
Pre-order for the win (US or UK)! 

10th anniversary editions of King of Thorns are available for pre-order!

They're signed & numbered.

In the US you can order a leather-bound deluxe copy with internal art from original cover artist Jason Chan. An object of beauty!


Lies, damn lies, and statistics to follow:

Goodreads severely mucked about with ratings numbers on Prince of Thorns and Red Sister in 2022 (possibly other books). There was a year PoT got a weird bump, which GR attributed to "flushing the buffers". It really is a befuddlingly badly coded site. I suspect the disapperance of 1000s of ratings was somehow linked to that event. A correction of a correction perhaps? In any event Red Sister now has FEWER ratings than it did this time last year, having gone up ~8,000 the year before...



The blog is bumping along around 1,000 hits a day - which isn't terrible - and passed 4 million in total in 2022.


I'm still on InstagramPintrest, and Tumblr

And finally, as ever, our favourite cesspit of witch hunts and fake news: Twitter, where I continue my crawl forward with an extra 2,700 followers this year, despite having lost ~300 since Mr Musk's takeover.



Many thanks to all my readers for keeping me going! I hope you all have happy holidays and that 2023 is much much better for all of us!




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Thursday 15 December 2022

My reading in 2022


2022 has not been a bumper year reading-wise, just 9 books read, nearing my lowest ever total of 8 reads. It was a really varied bag of books ranging across all manner of styles. The SPFBO champion and finalist are definitely worth a look if they appear to align with your tastes. And Shauna Lawless's debut is top notch, again caveated with it being the sort of book you're looking for. Hopefully the reviews linked from the brief descriptions below will help resolve those questions. A Gamble of Gods - Mitriel Faywood's genre-spanning debut has my praise on the cover!

Since I've been doing this my annual totals have run thusly:

2022 - 9 books

2021 - 9 books 

2020 - 8 books

2019 - 16 books

2018 - 16 books

2017 - 12 books

2016 - 16 books

2015 - 12 books

2014 - 12 books

2013 - 10 books


This year I spent 6 months on two books - both quite long, one rather dense (Satanic Verses - hardcore literary fiction) and the other somewhat out of my wheelhouse (Outlander - romantic historical fiction with lots of sex). I made up for that by speeding through two novels and a pulpy sci-fi book.

I'm now reading Phil Williams' Kept From Cages and enjoying it, even if it did give me a painful papercut on the way into Accident & Emergency.

I know some bloggers devour 200 or even 300 books in a year. I've no idea how. But I do like the fact that I can remember what happened in the books I've read, and I doubt that would be possible if I read ten times as many.

Here's a link to my reading in 2021. I've been doing this a while so you can step back quite a way.

As ever, every headline links to my review of the book on Goodreads. 

Presented in chronological order, most recent read first.