It seems like a lifetime ago that I was laying out some blogging goals for this year. Actually, it’s only been eight months. I originally planned to do a check-in at the end of June, but things, as they so often do, got away from me. So consider this a somewhat delayed update on those plans from back in January, looking forward to the rest of the year, and looking back at what I have and haven’t got around to.

Articles

Partial Success. I’ve somewhat met this goal by combining multiple reviews into thematic articles, but in the first half of the year I was firing on all cylinders. My Best of British month featured some articles I’m very proud of, and I even dabbled in a few ‘top ten’ style articles, though driven by analytics and not limited to an arbitrary number, because top tens are still the bane of the blogosphere. A lot of my long-term article plans, however, are yet to materialise in a satisfying manner.

Audiobooks

Roaring Success. As expected, Black Library have been my primary source of audiobooks, which has really helped me tap into the back catalogue of Warhammer 40,000. An unexpected boost came not from Star Was, but Star Trek. I am in awe of Robert Petkoff as a narrator, and this has allowed me to really get into the era of the original series. There will be plenty more audiobook reviews in the future.

Community

Failure. This one really deserves an article of its own, but while the Boundary’s Edge Social Club started off well, it petered out very quickly. There were some good discussions and two fun buddy reads, but I definitely overreached myself with this one.

Diverse Books

Partial Failure. A lot of this year’s reading has been me catching up on old series and familiar authors, which has been great, but does mean I haven’t branched out as much as I originally intended. A bumper crop of Star Trek books off eBay has kept me particularly busy, while some lucky finds have helped me reconnect with classic authors. That being said, all of this housecleaning has paved the way to make room for some new series in my life, though the odds suggest they’ll be space opera and military SF oriented.

Interviews

Success. I was lucky enough to score two big interviews earlier this year thanks to Star Trek stalwart David Mack and Black Library rising star Victoria Hayward. I’m hoping to get at least one more interview secured before the end of the year, but I’m very much happy with how this goal is going.

Logo

Failure. I’m not to broken up over this one. I did replace my bookshelf icon with some snazzy plain text, but I’m still mulling over a proper logo. The problem is committing to one idea, then finding someone with the artistic talent to pull it off. I haven’t completely abandoned this goal, but it is on the backburner for the time being.

New Authors

Partial Failure. I’m keeping up with Black Library’s new crop of authors with Gary Kloster, Victoria Hayward, and Rich McCormick all making waves , but outside of franchise tie-ins I haven’t read a single 2024 debut. It seems like a lot of modern science fiction just isn’t appealing to me, but I’m going to keep looking until I find something.

Old Books

Success. I have massively cut back on book expenditure thanks to some good old-fashioned second-hand bookshop crawling, both solo and in company, both in person and online. Not every book has been a winner, of course, but I’ve definitely tried series I’ve never heard of before thanks to a chance find. reading through some of the old Hugo winners has also been a delightfully unbalanced experience.

WarhamMarch

Partial Success. In retrospect, a scheduling clash between a planned blog event and my girlfriend visiting was always going to favour the latter. However, I did get the chance to celebrate Black Library’s best and brightest thanks to some scheduled posts. Next year will be a bit of a struggle to think of new Warhammer articles, but we’ll see what happens.

Conclusions

All things considered, a very mixed bag of successes and failures. Even those failures, however, have ben valuable learning experiences, and there’s still time to turn some of them around. As you can see from the title, this is part one of a multi-post roundup. Next time I’ll be looking more specifically at series I am reading, planned to read, have completed, or have walked away from. Hope to see you all there.