Category Archives: Article

Yearly Roundup: 2021 Numbers and Goals

Every year I do a retrospective post – or series of posts – in which I take a look back over the previous twelve months on Track of Words, and this year is no different. I’ve now been running Track of Words for eight years, which somewhat blows my mind, and I find it fascinating to look back at how the site has developed over those years. Not just how it’s grown in terms of people visiting, but also in how I’ve changed how I work on it, and the relationship between what I do for the site and what I read in general. In this article I’m going to take a look at a couple of retrospective elements, beginning with some numbers before moving on to reflections on how I did with my goals for 2021.

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Monthly Roundup – December 2021

Hello, and welcome to my Monthly Roundup post here on Track of Words. We’ve reached the end of December (not to mention the end of another year), and it’s been a busy few weeks here with a post every day from the 1st to the 25th as part of my Advent Calendar series. I really couldn’t be happier with how this turned out, and I’m incredibly grateful to all of the authors (and one editor) who contributed to the Advent series! I hope you’ve enjoyed reading all of the interviews, guest reviews, guest articles and everything else (including a brand new piece of original fiction) as much as I enjoyed working on them. If you haven’t had a chance to read them all I’ve included all of the relevant links below, and as usual as well as talking about this month’s new posts I’ll give a bit of a general update for the month.

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TBR: SFF Books Coming in 2022

I’ve seen lots of people writing their ‘most anticipated’ lists for 2022, and I’ve even published an excellent guest post from author Thomas Parrott along those lines, so I thought it was about time I jumped on the bandwagon and looked ahead to next year myself. If I’m honest, I’m hoping to spend much of 2022 catching up on books I didn’t get round to reading this year, but that’s not to say there aren’t loads of great books due for publication over the coming months that I’m very much looking forward to reading, so I’ve picked out some of my personal highlights to talk about here. For my main list I’ve concentrated on general SFF releases, but I’ve also included a shorter list later on of the Black Library novels I’m currently looking forward to the most.

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Best SFF Books of 2021

I’ve already talked about my favourite Black Library novels of 2021, but I think it’s time to look more broadly at the best science fiction and fantasy books I’ve had the pleasure of reading this year. Back in 2020 I put together a Top 20 of 2020 list but this year I’m trimming things back down to concentrate on my top 10, all of which are books I’ve given 5* reviews to (over on Goodreads where star ratings are a thing) and all of which I have sung the praises of all year! As ever it’s proved tricky to narrow things down to just ten, but I’m really happy with this selection – so take a look, and let me know what you think.

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To Judge a Book By Its Cover – Thomas Parrott Guest Post

Hello and welcome to this Track of Words guest post where today I’m letting author Thomas Parrott loose on the site to look ahead to 2022 and talk about some of the debut fantasy, horror and sci-fi novels coming soon that have caught his eye. I couldn’t be happier to have Tom on the site and I’m really keen to check out some of his suggestions (in fact as chance would have it I’m currently reading one of them), and I hope you’ll find some great new books to check out too! In addition, if you haven’t read any of Tom’s own work yet then I can highly recommend you check it out – I’ve included a link at the end of the article to all of my reviews of his stories, and keep an eye out for his debut novel Recruited, coming in February 2022 from Aconyte Books as the first of their stories set in the world of Tom Clancy’s The Division.

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Horror Fiction & Visual Media – David Annandale Guest Post

Hello and welcome to today’s Track of Words guest post where I’m delighted to welcome the brilliant David Annandale to discuss some of the ways in which visual media and horror fiction are influenced by, and in turn influence each other. David will be familiar to a lot of readers as the author of all manner of dark fantasy and science fiction for both Black Library and Aconyte Books, and whether he’s writing all-out horror or not everything he writes has that dark DNA at its core. With two new books already announced for 2022 from Aconyte Books – Reign of the Devourer, a Doctor Doom novel as part of the Marvel: Untold range, and In the Coils of the Labyrinth for Arkham Horror – I can’t think of a better time to hear David’s thoughts on this topic!

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In Praise of Susanna Clarke

Susanna Clarke’s second novel Piranesi was published in 2020, but it wasn’t until May 2021 that I finally read it (or rather listened to it), at which point I was powerfully reminded of just how great an author Clarke is. A couple of months after finishing Piranesi I dug out my copy of Clarke’s short story anthology The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories and finally read it, fifteen years after I bought it. Finally, in August, after dithering over whether I could sustain my attention for a 32.5 hour audiobook, I took the plunge and revisited Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in audio. Over the course of the next 35 and a half hours of listening (over a good two or three weeks) I came to the conclusion that not only is Jonathan Strange… one of my all-time favourite novels, but that Susanna Clarke truly is a literary treasure.

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The Spy Novels That Inspired Assassinorum: Kingmaker – Robert Rath Guest Post

Welcome to this Track of Words guest post, where today I’m welcoming the brilliant Robert Rath to the site to discuss the inspiration for his upcoming Black Library novel Assassinorum: Kingmaker. I’ve been a big fan of Rob’s writing since reading his debut BL short story, The Garden of Mortal Delights, and like a lot of people I was blown away by his novel The Infinite and the Divine! All three of his Assassinorum short stories have been fantastic, so I can’t wait to read Kingmaker and see more of the assassins in action. In this article Rob talks first about his early introduction to Imperial Assassins and then the spy novels that have particularly influenced Kingmaker, so read on and let’s start the hype building for the novel when it’s released sometime in 2022!

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When Life Gives You Bushfires – Nate Crowley Guest Post

Hello and welcome to Track of Words, where today I’m handing things over to the wonderful Nate Crowley for a fascinating guest post discussing disaster-driven winemaking, Black Library novels about (among other things) “gigantic, roaring green killing machines”, and the difficulties of writing during 2020 and 2021! If that sounds like an unusual combination, well…it is, but it really works – I think this is a fantastic article with a compelling mixture of dark humour and brutal honesty, touching upon themes that a lot of us can relate to. Author of my favourite Black Library novel of 2021 – Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh! – and some of the best, most entertaining books I’ve read over the last couple of years, if you haven’t yet checked out any of Nate’s work then I strongly recommend you remedy that very soon.

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The Most Popular Reviews in 2021

With 2021 almost at an end I thought it might be fun to take a look back at which reviews have been the most popular this year on Track of Words. I originally started this site purely as a reviews site, long before I started writing blog posts or publishing author interviews, and I’m always happy when visitors enjoy reading my reviews. In 2021 to date I’ve published 73 new reviews (55 book reviews, 18 short story reviews), which puts the total number of reviews at a whopping 1,119 – of which just three (so far) have been guest reviews, the remaining 1,116 written by me. To be honest that number came as a bit of a shock when I looked it up, as I hadn’t realised quite how many I’d written!

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