Category Archives: Article

Support Track of Words (If You Can)

I’ve been planning on writing this post for a while, but a reminder about my upcoming hosting/domain fees has brought it to the forefront of my mind. I’ve been running Track of Words for over six years now, and I’ve finally reached the point where I feel like I need to start asking readers of the site if they – you – are able to help support Track of Words. To that end, I’ve added a new page to the site, called (appropriately enough) Support Track of Words. I wanted to take a moment in this article to explain what I’m asking and why.

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Where to Start With Black Library: Sisters of Battle

Welcome to the first in a new series of Where to Start With Black Library articles on Track of Words, in which I’m going to try and demystify the process of getting into reading Warhammer fiction. With literally hundreds of Black Library books, short stories and audio dramas available, and new stories being released every week, it can be hard to know where to start, whether you’re brand new to Warhammer or you want to find out more about certain series, factions or characters. Hopefully I can help with that!

In this article I’m going to look at the Sisters of Battle, one of my favourite Warhammer 40,000 factions, and offer up some suggestions of great stories you might want to check out. The best place to start with these stories will depend on various factors, far too many for me to cover succinctly, so I’m going to suggest a few different lengths and mediums to give you options to choose from. Where possible I’ll stick to stories I’ve read and enjoyed myself, and link out to reviews where they’re available.

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Black Library Pre-Order Tracker

It can be hard to keep track of upcoming Black Library releases – there’s the occasional Warhammer Community article looking at previews/reveals; and the wider book trade, with websites like Amazon often updated with some information well in advance of books being published (although these are extremely unreliable). The Coming Soon page on Warhammer Community is long gone. Wouldn’t it be great if there was ONE place you could check which consolidated all of that information, and clearly laid it out to help you plan ahead and decide what to buy and when? Well as it happens, I’ve put together a spreadsheet containing all of the information I can find. I’ve embedded it into this article, and I keep it as up to date as possible, so check back any time to see what’s coming up.

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Yearly Roundup – 2020 Goals

Welcome to the third and (probably) final part of my Yearly Roundup for 2019. After covering 2019 in Numbers and my 2019 Highlights, this time I’m flipping things around and looking ahead to the rest of 2020 to talk a bit about what I’m hoping to achieve this year with Track of Words. I’m not planning on drastically changing anything – it’s still going to be the usual mix of spoiler-free and relatively short reviews, author interviews and occasional blog posts/other articles. I don’t just want to deliver more of (exactly) the same, however, so the idea is to pick up where I left off in 2019 and continue to branch out a little, covering a wider range of authors and stories in terms of both reviews and interviews.

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Yearly Roundup – 2019 Highlights

For the second of my Yearly Roundup articles for the year just gone – after the first one, which looked at 2019 in numbers – I’m taking a look at some of my highlights from the last twelve months. It’s been another busy year, that’s for sure, but a year which has brought with it a couple more interesting milestones, some really great interactions with readers and writers in the science fiction and fantasy community, and an awful lot of tremendously entertaining reading. With that in mind, I’ll talk about some of my personal highlights from running Track of Words before looking at the year in Black Library, and then some of the best stories I read over the course of the year.

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Yearly Roundup – 2019 in Numbers

A whole new year is ahead of us – a whole new decade, in fact – and so it’s time for me to write my usual roundup of the year just gone. Roundups, in fact, as this year I’m going to break things down into a few shorter posts rather than the usual HUGE roundup I tend to end up with. In this article I’ll take my usual look back at the year just gone via some numbers pulled from my Track of Words stats, and talk a little bit about which reviews, interviews and blog posts were the most popular in 2019. Keep an eye out for future articles looking at some of my personal highlights from the last twelve months, and then thinking ahead to what I’m hoping for in 2020.

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Monthly Highlights – December 2019

Not only have we reached the end of December, but we’ve come to the very end of 2019! I’ve talked recently about my personal favourite Black Library novels of the year, in my January to June and July to December articles as well as a post on the Warhammer Community site, but in this article I’m taking my usual look back at what I’ve been reading over the last few weeks. December is always an interesting month for me as it brings with it the Black Library Advent Calendar – 24 new short stories/audios – and I try to cram in as much reading as I possibly can before the end of the year.

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What Do You Want To See on Track of Words?

As 2019 comes to a close I’m increasingly looking ahead to what I can do with Track of Words over the next year and onwards. I’ve been running this site for six years now, growing it from nothing (I hadn’t written a book review for about 15 years!) to the point it’s at now, with – I think – a pretty wide range of reviews and articles across over 1300 posts. I don’t want to rest on my laurels, however, so in this article I’m asking for your thoughts on what you would like to see on Track of Words in the future.

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Black Library Advent Calendar 2019 – Recap

Another year’s Black Library Advent Calendar series is over, after nearly a month’s worth of brand new short stories, audio dramas and digital-only novels. As is now tradition, I’ve been writing daily reviews for each story as they’re released (excluding the novels – I don’t read that quickly), and you can find all of the links for those reviews right here. In this article, however, I’m taking a look back at the series as a whole to reflect on what’s been released, and talk about how individual stories connect to existing series…and maybe suggest what might be coming in the future.

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The Best Black Library Novels of 2019: July to December

I do like a good ‘best-of’ list, even though they’re tricky to put together! I was recently asked by the Warhammer Community team to write a ‘best Black Library novels of 2019’ article, which was fun (you can find that here), while back in July here on Track of Words I published a series of articles looking back at the first six months of 2019 and highlighting my favourite BL novels, short stories, audio dramas and anthologies that published up to then. It’s almost the end of the year now, so it’s time to do the same thing for the second half of 2019 – July to December. In this article I’m going to focus solely on the novels which stood out to me as the best reads.

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