2018, a year in review

Photo by Steven VanDesande Jr on Unsplash

Although November was a write-off¹, 2018 was a terrific year all told. If you permit me a moment’s indulgence, I figure there’s no harm in taking a moment to reflect on the year — as I think we should all do.

2018 was incredibly productive for me and marked the significant milestone of publishing my first book, The Weaver’s Boy. It happened almost by accident — an extract of the story being accepted by a magazine prompting me to publish the story as a novella. It was the right thing to do, and now, at last, I’ve something out there, and the response has been fantastic!

2018 by the numbers

When I totted up the numbers this year, I was quietly shocked.

Since January I’ve written 46 blog articles with a sum of 51,188 words. Over 40,000 people visited my website and my most popular article was my review of 3 Random Map Generators with more than 3000 unique readers.

I had a great year for fiction too. Early in 2018, I completed the first draft of my techno-thriller, First Byte, a manuscript with just over 90,000 words. I’m not yet sure what I’ll do with this story…

Fantasy is my first love, and I think I’ve at long last found my stride with the makings of a great series. I started writing The Weaver’s Boy in early February, and by June it was drafted, revised and edited. It weighed in at just over 21,000 words.

After that, I’ve drafted a prelude story titled Cadoc’s Contract — that’s roughly 20,000 words. I should have that revised by New Year’s Eve.

I’ve also started drafting The Prince’s Bastard, and A Man at Arms, books 2 and 3 of the Lords of Skeinhold and have written 21,000 and 16,000 words respectively. I’ll return to them once I’ve finished Cadoc’s Contract.

That makes for a total of about 219,000 words for the year — I’m quite pleased with that!

Website refresh

Over the last week, I’ve also taken the chance to refresh the design of my website. I’ve made it a little cleaner, more consistent and much more mobile friendly. The home page places my content front and centre, in a visually pleasing grid.

I’ve removed the Facebook and Twitter widgets as they felt out of place, I could never make them fit with the site’s design quite as I wanted.

Looking forward to 2019

I have a lot planned for next year as you can imagine. 2018 has given me a solid foundation — some of it you’ve seen, other things I’ve only hinted and teased at on social media.

At some point in early January, I’ll follow this up with a post where I share some of my plans!

Until then, I plan on resting up over the holidays and spending time with the family — and trying to get some sleep.