2018: Year in Review and Future Goals

I hope you’re not getting too sick of these types of posts at the moment, but I thought it would be fun to do as I find numbers and statistics quite interesting. I also thought I would use this opportunity to talk about my future ideas for this blog.

At the beginning of 2018 I wanted to end the year on 200 followers. As there was a sudden increase in followers during the last couple of weeks of 2018 I managed to get to 200 and then pass it by, which exceeded my expectations. Currently I’m on 207 followers. And here I would like to thank everyone who follows me. It is appreciated and I’m glad you like my work enough to keep an eye on what I’m posting. Thanks also to everyone who read, liked, and/or commented on my posts. I have an ambitious goal of ending 2019 on 500 followers. We’ll see how that unfolds…

And now the numbers:

138 posts (that’s a post every 2.64 days)

4,388 views

1,886 likes

379 comments

The top five countries people viewed my posts from were:

United States 1,749

India 722

United Kingdom 474

New Zealand (where I live) 388

South Africa 97

Most Viewed Articles:

Who Were the Istari?

A Last Jedi Remake?

One Year On

When All Else Fails I Bake

H.P. Lovecraft

Most Viewed Poems:

True Story

I Remember South Brighton

Second Letter

If I Was Closer…

Buying Sheets With My Girlfriend

Most Viewed Flash Fiction Challenges:

Their First Christmas

Taking A Photo

Graffiti

Awakening

The Mirror

Most Viewed Stories:*

Rekindling An Old Flame

The Visit

Second Conversation With A Vampire

The Inquisitor, part one

The Day They Arrived

Thanks again to everyone. That’s the Year in Review part done with.

Future Plans

So where to now?

In mid-December I decided to finish my Durn story offline. Though that’s caused a problem with lacking the motivation to finish it. I found posting it on my blog gave me the impetus to keep writing it as I thought some people might be expecting to see new chapters from me. Once I stopped doing that finding the motivation to keep on going with it has been difficult. I’m hoping to find a three week space where I can just work on it uninterrupted which should give me enough time to finish the last third of the book.

There is a horror story I’m working on which will be in two or three parts which should start appearing later this month. It’s one of my first forays into the Cthulhu Mythos. I’ve also got a humourous science fiction story as well which should be published here within the next week or so.

Three years ago I was working on a vampire novel and I have considered publishing what I wrote in weekly installments here. It may inspire me to continue with the story. I’ll need to tidy it up a bit to have it in publishable form, and I probably won’t consider doing this until I have the Sky-Pirates of Durn draft finally finished, so watch out for it in a couple of months at least. The working title is My Life In Darkness.

I also have around three new poems I’m working on, so hopefully they will begin to appear shortly (though my poems can take a long time to form), and there is also another article on Tolkien partially written.

As well as all these projects I will continue writing the flash fiction challenges from Sammi Cox and Charli Mills’s Carrot Ranch (and others) as they are fun to write and I think they help sharpen up my fiction writing skills.

So at least for the next few months I’ve certainly got a few ideas of things I can do and hopefully there will be more new ideas as the year progresses. And maybe that pesky vampire might want to continue talking to me…

I would like to thank Sammi Cox and Charli Mills for their writing prompts, H.R.R. Gorman, Sunilmdabral, Fractured Faith Blog, A.P. Christopher, Louise@DragonspireUK, Angela Archer, Tony Single and Tetiana Aleksina of unbolt me, Edmark M. Law, Charles French, Blackwings 666, Arcane Halloween, Our Little Red House, kaddietucker, and anyone else I’ve neglected to mention for their ongoing support and excellent posts over the last year (which I probably have) and a special shout-out to Count Vlad Dracula Tepes. Sorry I’m A- but I’m sure you’ll find someone to feed on eventually…

All the best and I hope you all have a great year with your own projects. May the words flow!

*Classifying stories differently from flash fiction was a bit difficult as some of these stories in this category could also be classed as flash fiction due to their length. In the end I went with the idea that this classification covers stories that were not written due to a prompt from another blog.

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It’s after five in the morning and I’m still working on this…