A Year In Numbers ... 15

 

At 15, this blog is now older than Prince Jorg Ancrath for the majority of my debut novel!

Although I spent 23 years as a research scientist I never spent longer than 10 years at any one job, so I guess that makes "authoring" my longest employment.

Anyway, onto the traditional accounting:

2025 turned out to be a pretty challenging year!

Celyn went into hospital 4 or 5 times this year, which is about average, but the most recent visit was very scary and the doctors were talking about "hours left". Earlier in the year my father had a similarly close brush in hospital. And recently and old friend of mine died unexpectedly. Also, Wobble suddenly took ill and died.

On a more positive note, because Celyn (now 21) gets much better care these days, I've been able to start travelling and I've been to book events in Zwolle (the Netherlands), Leeds, Edinburgh, Brighton, Belfast, and Bristol!

This post follows up from similar posts at the same time in 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 I record the ups and downs of the year. I take a minute to do the sums and raid the scrapbook.

I've now had my Patreon for more than 4 years and it has been great fun so far. The Discord is very active, and I've done a ton of critiques for the highest tier patrons.

Also - for tier 3+ people there are 7 of my unpublished books to download along with short stories and novellas!

The Book That Held Her Heart came out in 2024, concluding The Library Trilogy.    

My novel-related short story collections are now all available in paper form - many in hardcover!

The Broken Empire --> Road Brothers

The Red Queen's War --> The Red Queen's Ward

Book of the Ancestor --> Tales of Abeth

The Library Trilogy --> Missing Pages

  

April 2025 sees the release of book 1 of my next trilogy (The Academy of Kindness), 

Daughter of Crows.

And if you were to pre-order it, I would stand in your debt!

Lies, damn lies, and statistics to follow:

On the face of it, the blog has really taken off this year - getting a million hits in 12 months. I don't belive that for a moment though. Looking more closely, many of these hits are on pages about competitions I ran 5 or 10 years ago. I suspect bots scraping for content to feed AI, or something similar. It's sad because I now have no real idea how many people read what I put here.

I'm still on Instagram. And have added Threads and Bluesky (which has really taken off) to the failing Pintrest and Tumblr (I'm easy enough to find on them and too lazy to put links). 

And finally, as ever, our favourite cesspit of witch hunts and fake news: Twitter, where I continue my crawl forward with an extra 1,100 followers this year. Are any of them real ... no idea 😅

Many thanks to all my readers for keeping me going! I hope you all have happy holidays and that 2026 is good to us all!

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