A Writer's Blog Is Back

It has been nearly five years since I've composed a post for A Writer's Blog.  It's not that I've lost interest in either my writing or the books I wrote my little reviews about.  I have continued to write and I've continued to read.  So, why stop blogging?  (It makes me smile that the spelling checker doesn't underline "blogging."  My trusty Webster's New World College Dictionary doesn't even have an entry for blogging, yet it claimed, when published in 1999, that it was "defining the English Language for the 21st Century").

Part of the reason was that I was indeed writing a new novel, my third.  Much of the time and energy I would have given to blogging was directed to what turned out to be a long and complex project.  Longer and more complex than I'd imagined.  That's finished now and query letters for A Dangerous Heritage, my Civil War novel, are being emailed to agents in three countries.  (The whole process of seeking an agent has changed a lot in the fifteen years since I had one.  I'm sure this will be the subject of future posts.)   Partly, the social media landscape has changed so rapidly with the advent of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a host of other ways to communicate, that blogging seems a relic of another time.  A Gentler, slower, and more generous time.

Blogging didn't disappear, however.  And, more importantly, interest in blogs didn't disappear, either.  When, after years of never having checked my Blogger Dashboard, I finally checked in, I was surprised to find that from August 2012 to today, 11,958 pageviews of my blog were recorded.  Unsurprisingly, the most popular posts where the ones Google Searches for "Amelia Earhart" led to (635).  The runner up, surprising until you think of our time's obsession with racial politics, was my review of A Black Prisoner Of War, by James A. Daly and Lee Bergman.  The fact that 3 people viewed my blog yesterday and 169 people last month, tells me that my work (and don't kid yourself, it is work) isn't entirely for naught.

So, my blog is back.  To celebrate that I'll post this and reduce the price of my two eBooks shown for sale to the right to 99 cents each.