Seven years on the blog
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Today marks the seventh anniversary of this website, which I made public on this day in 2017. The first post here on the blog, a modest—by my present standards—reading year-in-review, appeared at the end of that month. Two years ago I reflected on my decision to start a blog in the first place and how different my life over the half-decade since I’d launched this site. It’s changed even more drastically since that post, and for the better.
As a measure of how the blog is growing, sometime last month I published my 600th post here. That milestone would have seemed unachievable to me when I was typing away about Sword of Honour and News of the World and launching Dark Full of Enemies seven years ago.
Reflection and planning ahead has typically been reserved for the New Year, but I’ve found this anniversary to be a better opportunity for me to do that kind of thinking. And so here, briefly, are a few short-term things as well as some long-term projects I’m either considering or planning:
What to expect soon:
I have a few essays and book reviews I intend to write with what’s left of the year, including some for other sites.
I’m outlining my usual year-in-review posts for books and movies. 2024 in books will be very fiction-heavy, as I’ve already noted here in my Spring and Summer reviews, and 2024 in movies will be short. I considered scrapping the latter altogether, given the state of American cinema, but there were a handful of new movies I really enjoyed and a few great new-to-me films that I want to mention.
What I’ll begin soon and you’ll see later:
It’s time to get The Wanderer, my longest novel, finished and available. I started the rough draft when our third child was a few weeks old. He’s now five and a half and has two baby brothers. The manuscript has been through a couple rounds of marking up, editing, and a whole lot of what I call “cooling on the windowsill,” but it needs to be done whether I ever feel like I’ve done enough research on sub-Roman Wales or not. I plan to start a final read-through over Christmas break.
I have two more novels in rough outline form and plan to move on one of them in the new year. I’m just having a hard time deciding which one.
The second installment of The Wælsings’ Revenge is in the works. If you missed part one, you can read it at Illuminations of the Fantastic. Portions of the final third, to be completed who knows when, appear in The Wanderer as foreshadowing.
An in-between project:
Since creating a Substack account in order to contribute guest posts like my essay on historiography and my review of Homer and His Iliad this summer and fall, I’ve considered using it for a biweekly or monthly newsletter. It would not be a proper blog, since I don’t want it to supersede what I’ve been doing here for seven years (for reasons Alan Jacobs lays out here), but a miscellany of what I’ve been reading, what I’ve been writing here, what I’ve been working on, quotations from whatever books I’m reading at the moment, and other miscellany.
If that’s something you think you’d enjoy or benefit from, please let me know. I’m considering launching this at the end of this month since, as this blog proves, that’s a fortuitous time for new projects.
Of course as helpful as this blog has been to me and as much as I’ve enjoyed it, it would be nothing without readers. Thanks for y’all’s readership, encouragement, and correspondence over the years. I pray we can enjoy that for many more.
