Hello, and welcome to this Monthly Roundup post here on Track of Words. August has been a quiet month for me on the Track of Words front, even more so than recently – this article I’m writing now is only the fourth I’ve published in the whole month, which is by far the lowest number for years. I feel like a bit of a broken record with how many times I’ve said something similar recently, but I really have found it hard working on new content in August, for various reasons (including my health). Or at least, hard working on the usual reviews and so on – I’ve actually been busy with some new elements of site structure and navigation, which you may have noticed if you’ve had a look at the menus recently.
For this article I’ll quickly run through the handful of new posts from August, and likewise the new site pages that I’ve recently added. I’ll then talk a little bit more later on about navigating Track of Words and why I’ve put so much work into these new pages, before giving a general reading/writing update.
Posts and Pages
Three posts really does feel like very little compared to what I’m used to publishing, but I’m pretty happy with all of them – two author interviews and one guest post.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Anna Stephens Talks The Serpent and the Dead – Anna’s first novel for Aconyte Books is part of the growing Marvel: Legends of Asgard range, this time featuring Lady Sif and Brunnhilde the Valkyrie. I chatted to Anna to find out more about the book, and how it feels to write for Marvel.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Tim Pratt Talks The Necropolis Empire – this is Tim’s second Twilight Imperium novel, after the excellent The Fractured Void (which was much funnier than I expected). I spoke to Tim to get the lowdown on what to expect from this new novel, which is “a standalone story set in the same universe, taking place after the events of the first book, with some little bits of crossover”.
The End of an Era – Matthew Ward Guest Post – with Legacy of Light now out, Matthew’s epic fantasy Legacy Trilogy comes to a close. As part of the blog tour for the new novel, Matthew contributed this excellent guest post talking about how it feels to finish a trilogy, and a bit about how he found the process of writing Legacy of Light.
As I mentioned earlier, along with those three posts I also published a variety of new site pages, all of which took quite a lot of work to put together. Later on I’ll talk a bit more about why I decided to create these pages…
Aconyte Books – Interviews and Reviews – I’ve been tremendously impressed with Aconyte over the last year or so, in terms of both how many books they’ve published and just how much I’ve enjoyed reading them. This page collects together links for all of my Aconyte-related reviews and interviews so that they’re nice and easy to find, and I’ve also included all of the upcoming books that have been confirmed so far – expect reviews and/or interviews for most, if not all, of those at some point.
Black Library: In-depth Interviews – over the years I’ve interviewed LOADS of Black Library authors, and some of those interviews have ended up being really quite in-depth and involved. I’ve linked out to all of these longer interviews on this page, ranging from multi-author round-tables to deep dives into individual authors’ working processes and particular releases.
Black Library Articles – I’ve written a lot of articles about Black Library, ranging from recaps of Advent Calendars and BL events to opinion pieces about BL’s approach to paperbacks or providing information about upcoming releases. You can find links to all (80+) of these articles on this page, ranging back all the way to some of my earliest pieces from back in 2014.
A note on navigating Track of Words
I thought it might be worth talking about why I’ve put these new site pages together and what they now mean for navigating around the site, in particular for anyone looking for Black Library content. Hopefully it’s pretty obvious why I created the Aconyte page – so that everything is in one place, and as easy to find as possible – and that’s basically the same for the BL pages, albeit on a slightly larger scale. It’s all well and good writing all of these reviews, articles, interviews etc. but if visitors to the site can’t find them, then the site isn’t as useful as it could be.
So the TL;DR version is basically that I want to try and make Track of Words as easy to navigate as possible, and therefore as valuable a site as possible. Hopefully that seems sensible! If you’re wondering why I put so much time and effort into this, then here’s a stat that might be of interest – at the time of writing, I’ve published 1,335 posts on Track of Words which are categorised under Black Library. I’ve already put a huge amount of work into this content, so it only seems sensible to try and make it as easy to find as I can!
Depending on how much attention you pay to the menus on the site, you may or may not have already seen that I’ve been slowly putting some of these pages live on the site over the last few months. I think they’re pretty much finished for now – here’s how the main site menu looks:
The Black Library section is broken down into the following pages (click on the links below if you want to take a closer look):
The idea is that it’s all laid out (hopefully) neatly and clearly in the menus, so that someone who knows what they’re looking for (“I wonder if ToW has interviewed Alec Worley about his Warhammer Crime audio drama?”, for example) can easily find it. Alternatively, if someone just wants to have a look around and see what’s available, they can also easily do that by starting with the ‘Black Library on Track of Words’ landing page, or the main BL Interviews page, and navigating from there. I’ll do my best to keep all of these pages up to date, if and when I publish any new BL-related content.
Some of these pages – like the individual AoS and Horus Heresy reviews pages – have been around for a while, but I’ve recently tidied them up and added them into the menu structure properly. Most of them are reasonably new though, so if you haven’t had a look at them before – and assuming you’re interested in Black Library content – then I would recommend you check them out and see if anything takes your fancy. As I said earlier, there are more than 1,300 BL-related posts available to read, so there should be something for pretty much anyone. While putting the new pages together (and creating MANY new header images so that they’re all nice and consistent) I was reminded of loads of interviews and articles that I’d forgotten about – there’s so much stuff in there!
Anyway, I hope the menus and site pages are useful. Please do let me know if you’ve got any feedback or suggestions for things you’d like to see!
General update
Lastly, here’s a quick overall update on my reading and writing progress in August. As I’m writing this I’ve finished 9 books so far this month, and I’m nearly halfway through another which I might possibly finish before the end of the month…but I don’t really mind when that happens. Interestingly though, I also started a couple of other books and stalled with them, which is unusual for me – I was enjoying both of them, I think it’s just that August has been a weird month and my head wasn’t in the right place. I’m hoping to get back to both of them soon, and hopefully write reviews for them too.
In total, I’ve read 91 books so far in 2021, which I think is pretty good! I usually talk in these articles about one of my goals for the year, which is to read at least 50% books written by non-male authors, and currently I’m up to 47 written by women (so that’s 52%). Add in The Stitcher and the Mute by D.K. Fields (a husband/wife writing duo) and a mixed anthology, and I’m very happy with that ratio right now. It’s not just an exercise in box-ticking, either, as I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading books written by authors with such varied voices. That’s the point, really – I want variety and range in my reading.
I’m actually re-reading this at the moment – it’s fantastic!
As you can probably see based on how little I wrote in August, I basically gave up on trying to get things written for this month, so I could try to get my head sorted. It took me the best part of two weeks to get back into any sort of life rhythm after having (and eventually passing) a kidney stone, and then more time still to feel like I was fully back to normal, and I think I quickly realised that I basically just needed to be kind to myself and not put myself under any more pressure than necessary. I’m starting to get back into the swing of things now (writing this article is helping!), and over the last week or so I’ve done a reasonable amount of writing that I haven’t yet published, on top of putting together all those site posts. I have a couple of reviews written and ready to go soon-ish, and I’ve either planned or completed several new author interviews that should be coming soon, including something that I hope BL fans will enjoy.
So that’s where I’m at right now. I hope you had an easier August than I did, with plenty of great books to read – and here’s hoping September is going to be good all round!
***
I’m always keen to hear about what you’ve enjoyed reading or listening to recently, what you think about the interviews and articles I’ve been publishing of late, whether you’ve read and enjoyed any of the books I tackled this month, and whether there’s anything you’d like to see in these roundup articles! Do drop me a line in the comments below, or get in touch on Twitter.
If you’d like to support Track of Words and help me to keep working on new content, you can leave me a tip over on my Ko-Fi page.
