Post #101 – A Look Back

Now that I have done 100 posts on WordPress since I started my blog, I thought I would do a look back and highlight some of my posts.

Firstly I would like to thank everyone who has followed me, and all those who have liked, commented, shared, or even just viewed my posts. Thank you all for your support. I really appreciate it.

When I first began this blog my plan was to write articles about my interests and so I began with an article on a computer game I loved and then did several posts on aspects of Middle-earth and Star Wars respectively (both passions of mine). At some point when I didn’t feel like writing anything I put one of my poems up and found there was an audience here for poetry, which at the time I hadn’t considered. If you look at the blog now it is very different. I still put poetry up, in fact my blog has been instrumental in helping me complete two of my longer sequences which I had been trying to finish for sometime, but I also post a lot of my fiction these days. And that’s something I would never thought I would be doing when I first began.

My first post was in November 2017. At that point I had been going through the worst year of my life and I felt very isolated. I felt I needed to connect with people in some form. Beginning to write and publish articles here gave me a great distraction from everything I was going through at the time. Having this blog has done a great deal to build up my self-esteem, which was at an all time low a year ago. And now here I am writing and publishing a serialised story, as well as other stories. It’s amazing what the difference of a year makes.

My main “problem” for this blog is that I keep coming up with new ideas for articles to write. In fact I have an entire page or more of ideas of things I can write about, and I truly hope I can eventually get round to writing the bulk of them.

 

I thought I would mention a few of my posts:

Most Viewed: Dragons of Middle-earth

Most Liked: Buying Sheets With My Girlfriend

Most Comments: The Night I Wanted To Die

Honourable mentions:

Life Is Strange, Or How The Rest of Humanity Should Never Trust Me. This was my first post and as I linked it to all the Life Is Strange groups on Facebook it was always my most viewed one as well, until a couple of weeks ago.

Athena Watches. This was the first poem I had written in a couple of years, and I was pleased it got a good reaction and was for a long time my most liked post.

The Return (full sequence). It’s hard to convey how pleased I was to finally finish this. It had been hanging over my head for ten years, and WordPress gave me a reason to finally work on it again and complete it. Yay!

Drought Rhythms. Probably my most favourite poem that I’ve written. It’s a poem set long after an apocalypse, and a group of humans (possibly the only ones left) that try to survive in an isolated valley somewhere. Any type of religious belief has long since given way to a shamanistic worship of the land.

My Thoughts On The Last Jedi. I think my longest article at 3800 words. I abandoned an even longer one I was writing on the Prequels. It was looking like it was going to be over 10,000 words, and who the hell was going to read that?

Who Were The Istari? My Middle-earth articles are written as essays, and I would do a lot of research for them. I thought this was the best written one of them all, and it was the last one I wrote. I was writing one on the Palantiri later on, but I abandoned it as I lost enthusiasm for it. I am thinking about writing another one on Ungoliant however, someday…

Falling In Love. My most gooey romantic poem.

Dishonourable Mentions:

Proxima Calling. My least viewed post with a whole two people bothering to read it. It’s a shame really. It’s probably not the most accessible poem that I’ve written but I have always felt it should have done better.  I don’t like explaining my poetry that much. I prefer to leave it to the reader to work out what it means to them, but that said… It’s about the search for extraterrestrial life, and I wonder what we are looking for. Are looking for another version of ourselves out there? I think any intelligent life we find out there may be vastly different from our understanding. If we were contacted by another galactic civilisation and we sent them back a message, due to the distances involved, it is likely that civilisation will no longer exist by the time they get our message (or maybe even by the time we get their message). That said, I’m supportive of things like SETI, but I do wonder if contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation is possible.

Rey and The Force Awakens. An article that got zero likes and spectacularly failed to predict what happened in The Last Jedi regarding Rey’s parentage, which I thought I had convincingly worked out…

 

Lastly there are some people I would like to thank who have given some extra support to this blog:

A.P. Christopher, constant VARIABLE. I’m not the greatest fan of rhyming poetry, but I do like it when it’s done cleverly which is something he does very well. His stories are worth reading as well, such as 100 Words which is in 11 parts. He also collaborates with other bloggers with writing stories. It was one of these collaborations, a fantasy one I believe, which gave me the idea of starting my own serialised story. So if it hadn’t been for him, The Sky-Pirates of Durn may never have happened, and I am so very grateful for this.

H.R.R. Gorman. Writes quite clever and interesting stories and also has written some poetry. Is not afraid to write about some challenging subjects either. Has been very supportive with lots of positive comments and also plugged my Sky-Pirates of Durn story in a post.

Fractured Faith Blog. Blogs on a variety of interesting topics and I have ended up commenting on his posts more often than I would expect. At the moment he is working on a book. He also sets interesting fiction challenges and both The Banishing and The Mirror were written because of these.

StCyril. Gives out very good advice for writers on his blog. He has also plugged The Sky-Pirates of Durn in one of his posts, and I am grateful for that.

 

Apologies to anyone else I should have mentioned here. 🙂

Please feel free to mention your blog in the comments section and what it’s about.

Do you think your own blog has changed from what it began as?