Category Archives: Article

Monthly Roundup – February 2023

Welcome to my Track of Words Monthly Roundup post for February 2023. I hope February has treated you well – it’s been a little quieter for me than January was, but still pretty good overall. For this roundup I’ll do my usual recap of the last few weeks’ posts, after which I’ll continue with the style of article I adopted last month – talking very briefly about how I got on with my reading before concentrating mostly on interesting goings-on in the world of SFF. I enjoyed putting last month’s roundup together, and I hope it was interesting – do let me know what you think!

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Like Warhammer? Try This: Aconyte Books

I know a lot of Track of Words readers are big Black Library fans, but what if – like me – you’re keen to look beyond the boundaries of Warhammer and find new fantasy and science fiction worlds to explore? It can be tricky to know where to start, and with so many SFF books published each year choosing a new book or series can sometimes feel a bit intimidating. The answer, I think, is to try something by an author you’re already familiar with – so think of your favourite Black Library authors, and look for some of their non-BL stories! Not every BL author writes for other publishers, but plenty of them do, so you’ve got a ready-made list of writers whose work will give you great entry points to the wider world of SFF.

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Black Library Celebrations

Every year Games Workshop puts on what it calls a ‘Black Library Celebration’, which is supposed to be an opportunity for fans to…well…celebrate all things Black Library, but every year it ends up a bit of a damp squib (or should that be a damp squig?). This year, rather than bemoan another missed opportunity and another day of website chaos, I thought I’d do something different and put together my own small celebration of all the things I personally think are cool about Black Library fiction. I’m going to talk about why I read BL stories and what I get out of it, then pick out some highlights from recent years in terms of book reviews, articles and author interviews, all of which I think genuinely celebrate Black Library.

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Demystifying the Pitch: Bone Armour by Victoria Hayward

I’m thrilled to be joined by the fantastic Victoria Hayward who’s very kindly written something a little different for Track of Words, with an intriguing article deconstructing one of her successful short story pitches, and providing a fascinating insight into this lesser-seen aspect of the writing process. Bone Armour was published in Grimdark Magazine, and I absolutely loved it – it’s a genuinely bleak, brilliant, unconventional science fiction story – so I was delighted when Victoria offered to write about her pitch for it. Writing story pitches can seem like something of a dark art, so this article is perfect for anyone interested in pitching their own stories, or indeed anyone who just enjoys a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the writing process. Oh, and keep reading for a short excerpt from Bone Armour too!

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Monthly Roundup – January 2023

Hello and welcome to the first Monthly Roundup post of 2023, here on Track of Words. I hope you had a great January – for me it’s been a pretty busy month with lots of reading (as usual) and a fair amount of writing, as I got myself back into gear for this, my tenth year of running Track of Words. As I always do with these roundups, I’m going to start things off with a recap of everything I posted on the site in January, so you can catch up on anything you might have missed. After that I’m going to do something a little different than usual, talking less about myself (which nobody really needs) and more about what’s going on in the world of SFF books, as I start to tweak the structure and purpose of these articles – so I hope you’ll keep reading, and let me know what you think!

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2023 Plans and Goals

I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions, but over the nine years (and counting) that I’ve been running Track of Words I’ve found it useful to set myself some rough goals for each year, and spend some time thinking about what I want to achieve with the site. It’s useful to have things to be working towards as I’m planning and writing new content, as long as I give myself enough flexibility to be able to change things or decide to focus elsewhere if need be (I also don’t like hard and fast goals like “I’m only going to read X”, as I don’t want my reading to feel prescriptive). You can read about the goals I set for 2022 here, and how I got on with them here, but in this article I’m going to look ahead to what I’m hoping to achieve in 2023. I’ll start off by talking in general terms about how I see the year going, and then look at some specific goals I’ve set myself for the site, and for my own reading.

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Yearly Roundup – 2022 Numbers and Goals

As 2022 comes to a close it’s time for my usual yearly roundup post, where I look back at the last twelve months on Track of Words. It’s strange to think that 2023 will be my 10th year of running this site – I’m still not sure how this went from something to do just to keep me occupied, into something that I’ve committed a huge amount of time to over nearly a decade! Anyway, at the end of the site’s 9th year let’s have a quick look at how things have been going recently. As usual with these posts, I’ll go through some stats for things like number of posts/words and number of page views/site visits, then talk a bit about the goals I set for the year and how I did with those.

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Monthly Roundup – December 2022

Hello and welcome to the final Track of Words post of 2022 – my Monthly Roundup for December, in which I’m going to look back at what’s been going on over the last month here on Track of Words. As it always is in December, it’s been pretty busy for me – I talked last month about the preparation that went into my Advent Calendar series, and this month it’s been all about getting each of those articles, guest posts, interviews etc. ready and up on the site. I’m quite looking forward to a considerably quieter January, but it’s actually been a lot of fun working on the Advent Calendar series, and I hope you’ve been enjoying all the posts this month. In this article I’ll give a recap of everything that I posted in December as usual, and then follow that up with a quick update talking about the Advent series and how things have gone in December in general.

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Finally! Series I’m Going to Start (At Last)

Like pretty much everyone else, I find there are always too many books I want to read and not enough time in which to read them, so I inevitably end up having a bunch of books that I really, really want to read…but never get around to. With that in mind, in 2023 I’m planning on making an active effort to look back at books that have been on my TBR list for a while but which I haven’t managed to get to. In particular, I’ve picked out 10 trilogies or series which I haven’t yet started but have been meaning to, and I’m going to at least make a start on each one. Ideally I’d like to read the whole trilogy/series (or at least whatever’s been published so far) in each case but I might not manage that, so the plan is to read at least the first book from all 10.

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ToW Advent 2022 – Collected Recommendations

After 24 days of brilliant guest posts, insightful author interviews and compelling original fiction (and a few roundup posts from me), the Track of Words Advent Calendar has come to an end for its second year running. If you’ve been following the series from the start, I really hope you’ve enjoyed at least some – if not all – of the content, while if this is your first engagement with the series I’d strongly recommend you skip to the main article and check out all the great posts there! Either way, now we’ve reached the end of the Advent Calendar I want to say a massive thank you to everyone who contributed to the series, without whom it would have been a quieter and much less interesting month on Track of Words!

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