I remember the night that I very nearly turned my back on writing for good. I abandoned my writing blog, shut down my Facebook and Twitter accounts, put away every project I was working on at the time and didn’t even think about any of them for months. One of my best fan-fiction stories, in particular, got an enormous hiatus. Tuesday, 8 November 2016.

It wasn’t just the election and the results of that, although that certainly did feel like a blow. I’d been getting increasingly frustrated with what I was doing as a writer, too.

Story after story was almost getting into the short-fiction markets, getting immediate attention from lead editors who were sending me non-boilerplate feedback, and yet I couldn’t actually seem to close the deal and sell something. The best opportunity I seemed to have gotten was from a literary “contest” that vanished like a thief in the night, claiming the rights to my story but never actually doing anything with it. Even my fan-fiction was getting less and less of a response, although at least people seemed to still be reading it . . . silently. It was beginning to look as if the height of my creative career would be a handful (as in, less than five) nominating votes for the Campbell Award one year.

In short, I wasn’t in a very good place even before my fellow countrymen chose to elect the most manifestly corrupt and unfit candidate in a century to our highest office. After that, I pretty much lost all interest in creating anything. For months I went silent. I concentrated on my family and my day job, went weeks at a time without writing a word. It didn’t help that the Sharrukin’s Palace domain name lapsed and some domain squatters grabbed it for a year. The thought of starting a writing blog over from scratch just made me tired.

I got better, of course. I eventually finished the fan-fiction story I had abandoned in mid-stream (with an ending I would never have written before, but which I think is actually superior to what I originally had in mind). I started working on other stories again, off and on. I picked up the Architect of Worlds project again and started researching and revising that.

I suppose it helped that, although the world has been going down a lot of dark and very dangerous paths in the past couple of years, the worst has not happened. Come on, I’m a student of history and a speculative-fiction writer. I imagined a lot of things that – well, let’s be honest, they may yet come to pass. But they haven’t yet, and there are signs that a lot of decent people are pissed off and starting to fight back. So I began to feel creative again.

In March of this year, the Sharrukin’s Palace domain escaped the grubby paws of those domain squatters who had grabbed it. I pounced on it and brought it back into my own control. By April, I was ready to start this iteration of my writing blog. I self-published a novelette, and at least started a few other writing projects before I settled on the one I’m currently working. I did a bunch of new work on Architect of Worlds.

In short, I’m back in business. There’s some balance back in my life, between my family, my day job, my health, and the chance to do creative work. Let’s hope that lasts.

So, with respect to this blog, let’s look at the top ten posts for 2018:

1. Architect of Worlds – Step One: Primary Star Mass
2. Bios: Genesis – The First Billion Years
3. Revisiting GURPS Greece: Incomes, Status, and Prices
4. Bios: An Exercise in Worldbuilding through Gameplay
5. Bios: Megafauna – Opening Remarks
6. Designing the Vasota Species
7. Review: Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
8. Architect of Worlds – Step Eleven: Place Planets
9. Bios: Genesis – The Second Billion Years
10. Architect of Worlds – Step Eight: Stellar Orbital Parameters

None of that counts the large plurality of visits to the blog (about 45%), which just hit the home page and scroll down from there.

I can probably explain most of these results by observing that posts which get linked from Reddit seem to do well. So do GURPS-related posts that get linked from Doug Cole’s Gaming Ballistic blog – thanks, Doug! Still, I keep getting perennial visitors to the site looking for the Architect of Worlds project. Also, the biggest worked example of worldbuilding that I did all year also keeps getting hits months later.

Noted and logged – I’ll have to see if I can push Architect forward in 2019, and do some more extended examples. But tomorrow is the big day to look forward and maybe make some resolutions, so I’ll come back then.

In the meantime, I hope the coming year is fruitful and productive for all of us.