Category Archives: Article

Finally Reading The Shepherd’s Crown

As readers there might be many authors that we love, but there aren’t necessarily very many that are genuinely important to us; for the enjoyment that their books give us, but also on a more personal level as human beings. Terry Pratchett is perhaps the important author to me personally, over and above anyone else before or since, and he has been for a long time. He’s the author whose death hit me the hardest, whose absence I still feel the most, whose books I would choose if I could only choose one author’s books to ever read again. I’ve read every Discworld novel at least twice, some many more times than that…except, actually I haven’t. There’s one that until very recently I had never read – The Shepherd’s Crown, the 41st and final Discworld novel.

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Monthly Roundup – August 2022

Hello and welcome to August’s Monthly Roundup post here on Track of Words. To my considerable surprise, August was a pretty busy month for me in terms of writing and getting things posted, but I’ve just been going with the flow and enjoying being in a productive mood! I spent slightly less time reading than last month (albeit still plenty of time), but quite a bit more time writing, spurred I think by some nice surprises that I’ll talk about shortly. As always, I’ll recap all of the reviews and interviews that I’ve posted over the last few weeks, and then write up a few thoughts about the month as a whole for a general update later on.

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Monthly Roundup – July 2022

After June’s rather delayed roundup, I’m back on schedule with July’s post after a month that’s been busy on the reading front and just a little quieter than usual on the writing front. It’s also been unseasonably warm for those of us living in the UK (oh how I would have loved air conditioning this month!) but thankfully I didn’t melt, and have remained in solid form despite the heat. As always in this article I’ll run through the various posts that I’ve published over the last few weeks so you can catch up on anything you missed, and then I’ll give a quick general update for anyone interested.

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On Comfort Reading

As readers we often talk about comfort reading, and a lot of us have go-to genres, series, authors or individual books that we look to for comfort and relaxation. Unsurprisingly, for a long time I’ve turned to SFF for my comfort reading, whether that’s Warhammer fiction, Terry Pratchett, or more recently things like Rivers of London and The Murderbot Diaries. As a reviewer, reading purely for the enjoyment of it (as opposed to reading for the purpose of reviewing) is something I think a lot about, and recently I’ve noticed something interesting – that my comfort reading has actually involved reading quite a lot from outside my usual comfort zone. With that in mind I thought I would take a brief step away from my usual SFF focus here on Track of Words and talk a bit about the sorts of books I’ve been finding comforting of late. In particular, about two genres which I wouldn’t ordinarily cover here, but which I’ve been enjoying reading very much: crime fiction, and nature writing.

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Monthly Roundup – June 2022

It’s somewhat delayed, what with a seaside holiday, birthdays and a wedding (not mine, one that I attended!) keeping me busy, but better late than never – here’s my Monthly Roundup post for June 2022. As always I’ll quickly run through everything that I posted (and updated) last month, before giving a fairly short and sweet general update on how things have been of late. I have a similar number of new posts to talk about as May (perhaps eight is going to be the new norm that I’ll settle into), so do take a look at any of those which you haven’t already read!

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A Big Milestone

I reached a big milestone with Track of Words recently, and at the risk of sounding utterly self-indulgent I wanted to write a little something to mark the occasion. I’m in my ninth year of running Track of Words, which in itself feels bizarre to think about, as I can still remember writing my first review way back in 2014. Since that day I’ve reached various milestones, the biggest of which being in 2018 when I published my 1,000th post and then in 2019 when I hit a million words written on the site. This latest milestone might be the biggest yet though – as of about 10.30pm on the 9th June, my WordPress stats showed that Track of Words had just passed one million page views!

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Sci-fi in a Fantasy World – Kate Dylan Guest Post

Hello and welcome to this Track of Words guest post, where I’m delighted to welcome author Kate Dylan with a fascinating article exploring some of the differences between science fiction and fantasy, the ways in which some stories work better as SF than F, and what those differences might mean for both writers and readers. If you’ve ever pondered questions like what the difference is between science and magic, or between a tech company and a coven of witches, or how an eight year-old child would end up with a computer implanted in her brain, then this article is going to be of interest!

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Monthly Roundup – May 2022

Hello and welcome to my Monthly Roundup post for May 2022, which is a bit more positive than last month’s after a slightly more productive few weeks. It wasn’t so long ago that publishing eight new posts in a month would have felt like a very lean month, but after slowing down to only five in April I’m actually quite pleased with May’s output – not to mention the five existing Black Library articles that I updated as well (more on those later). As usual I’ll do a quick recap of May’s new posts – as well as the updated articles – and then move onto a general update for the month, where I’ll talk a bit about what I’ve been reading and just give an overview of how things have been going in general.

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Opinions: Plagiarising Book Reviews is Weird

So there I am, idly browsing Twitter, when I see an author happily tweeting some positive reviews of his latest book, delighted to know that readers have been digging it. “Cool,” I think, “I enjoyed that one. let’s see what other people are saying about it.” I flick through screenshots of Audible reviews, then stop, puzzled. “Am I going mad?” I wonder. I keep scrolling. “Hey, thanks for sharing my review,” one Tweeter gushes in the replies. Scratching my head, I open Goodreads and check the review I wrote a few days earlier. I flip back to Twitter, and yep. That’s my review, copied word for word into Audible by someone else, who’s brazenly taking credit for it.

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Monthly Roundup – April 2022

Hello and welcome to my Monthly Roundup post for April 2022, which this month is going to be more of a reading roundup than usual…given that I only published five posts, the lowest number I’ve managed since way back in March 2016. Since there isn’t much to talk about in terms of what I’ve been writing, this will probably be quite a quick post, as even in my usual ‘General Update’ section I don’t really have too much to include. Perhaps I’ll find more to write about what I’ve been reading recently – we’ll see! In the meantime though, I’ll start off as usual with a quick (in this case very quick) recap of the posts I did manage to write and publish last month.

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