Hello and welcome to this Track of Words guest review, where today my good friend and fellow reviewer Fabienne Schwizer is here to talk about The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young – out now from Quercus. An “atmospheric mystery” exploring themes of family, guilt, time travel and murder, this sounds great! Over to Fab to tell us more…
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Hello and welcome to this Track of Words guest post, where I’m delighted to be joined by Maud Wood – author of Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock, which is out today from Angry Robot! It sounds like an absolutely fascinating novel, but something else that sounds fascinating is Maud’s approach to crafting stories. In this guest post Maud takes us through her use of tarot cards as a writing tool, something I’d never considered before…but which I think makes a lot of sense! Whether you’re a writer yourself or simply interested in what goes into the work of writing a novel, this is a really interesting article.
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I’ve been running Track of Words for 10 years now (well, technically my 10 year anniversary is at the end of January, but who’s counting?!), and over that period I’ve constantly adjusted how much time and energy I’ve put into the site. In recent years I’ve cut down quite heavily, but over the course of the last few months I’ve come to an incontrovertible conclusion – I need to slow right down. I’m tired, basically. I need to step back a bit from what’s coming perilously close to feeling like a job, rather than a hobby, and I think 10 years marks a good time to draw a line under things. I’m not stopping entirely, but now’s the right time to change focus and try to remember what life was like before I started this website.
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Welcome to 2024 – it’s a new year, so as usual (and like almost every blogger/reviewer out there) I’m taking a look back at the last year in numbers. This isn’t just a new year for me though – the end of 2023 marks 10 years of Track of Words, which is a milestone I never expected to be writing about. I’m planning on writing a couple more end of year/start of year posts soon, including a retrospective of the last 10 years, but for this article I’m going to stick with looking back at 2023 in numbers. I’m going to look at various types of numbers – two sets of site stats, in terms of articles/words written and pages viewed, a breakdown of the different kinds of posts I published in 2023, and my reading stats for the year.
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The last couple of years I’ve written articles looking ahead to the following 12 months and picking out upcoming books I’ve been looking forward to reading…so let’s carry on and do the same thing this year! From last year’s list, nine of the 10 books I chose were published (we’re still waiting on Alecto the Ninth, sadly) and I did manage to read six of them, so that’s not too bad. Let’s see if I manage more from this list! For each of the books I’ve chosen for this list I’ve included the official publisher’s synopsis and added a few of my own observations – and I’ve listed these books by their month of expected (UK) publication, based on the release dates that were correct at the time of writing.
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Hello and welcome to this Track of Words guest post, where today I’m delighted to welcome back Thomas Parrott, whose third Tom Clancy’s The Division novel – Hunted – is coming out in January from Aconyte Books (completing the Operation: Crossroads trilogy)! Tom has kindly contributed a thought-provoking article discussing the journey he’s been on with this trilogy of tie-in novels, which begins with 2022’s Recruited before continuing with Compromised (also 2022) and then onto Hunted, which is out in just a few days (at the time of writing this). I’m always fascinated by writers’ experiences working on novels and series, so to me this is an intriguing exploration of the realities of working on this sort of project, and the work that goes into it!
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It’s been almost 10 years since I started Track of Words, and over that time I’ve read somewhere north of 400 Black Library books (not to mention goodness knows how many short stories), and reviewed a large proportion of those! As I draw to the end of this 10-year period, I thought it might be interesting to look back at all those BL books and pick out my personal highlights from the last decade. I’ve gone through each year from 2014 to 2023 and, from the books that a) were published that year, and b) I actually read that year, selected a single book as my pick for each year – and I tell you, that was not an easy task!
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Hello and welcome to this Track of Words author interview, where today I’m talking to the fantastic Lorraine Wilson about her upcoming novella The Last to Drown, which is coming out in February 2024 as part of the 2024 Luna Novellas series from Luna Press Publishing! I’ve really enjoyed talking to all three of the 2024 novella authors, and this interview is no exception – it’s been fascinating to find out about what to expect from The Last to Drown, the themes explored in the novella, and what Lorraine’s experiences have been like working on this book! Read on to find out more about this intriguing novella…
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Hello and welcome to this Behind the Scene post here on Track of Words, where today I’m joined by one of my absolute favourite authors – Josh Reynolds – with an excerpt from the first chapter of his third Zombicide novel Do Or Die. I’ve covered a lot of Josh’s work here on Track of Words, and Zombicide as an IP really feels like an ideal fit for his style – that’s certainly the impression I got from his first novel in this setting, Last Resort. If you’re keen to get a sense of what to expect from Josh’s Zombicide work, this excerpt is exactly what you’re been looking for!
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Hello and welcome to this extra-special Track of Words guest post; special because I’m delighted to be hosting my very own sister – Sarah Brooks, author of the upcoming novel The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, coming in June 2024 from W&N Books! I am, as you can probably imagine, very excited about this particular book release, and I can’t wait to read it (at the time of writing, I’ve just got my hands on an advance copy), and to see it out in the wild in 2024. In the meantime though, I’m so pleased that Sarah has agreed to contribute this guest post, in which she’s going to talk a bit about the magic of strange train journeys in fiction, something that will be relevant for anyone interested in The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands! So without further ado, over to Sarah.
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