Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Christmas Come Early, or Come on In, The Water's Fine

Come on in!
Jeffro Johnson, the editor over at the Castalia House blog just published his year-end retrospective of the best book bloggers of 2016, and it turns out your host made the list.  I won't spoil the surprise for those of you who haven't read that post yet.

If you have any interest in the Pulp Revolution or the burgeoning literary discussion of the old masters and the new talent, you need to read through that list.  It's a veritable who-is-who of the literary smart set, and if you look close you'll see that it's the source of most of my own magic.

As mentioned in the comments, I jumped into the blogging pool because the Puppies, both Rabid and Sad, showed me that there really was good stuff out there after all.  I'd pretty much given up on the sf/f genre for reasons already elucidated on this blog and elsewhere.  Jeffro showed me that talking about great books wasn't just something that established authors like Vox and Hoyt and Wright could do, but that there was room in the swimming hole for average everyday fans like you and me.  On the flip side, Cirsova showed me that there was great new stuff worth talking about - stuff that wasn't getting near enough attention from fans.

So I did what any self-respecting fan would do - I went on the internet and complained about it.

For a while I just dove into the comments sections of places like Castalia House and Cirsova and such.  After a while, my comments became long enough and drew from enough different posts from other people, that it only made sense to kick off my own blog to expand and expound on my comments elsewhere.

Turns out, that's a great way to drive traffic to your blog.  Talking about books actually leads you to other people who like talking about books.  Elementary, dear reader.  Put together a few observations or tie together observations made by two other bloggers, and before long...you've got a blog.

You see how easy that is?  If you're here, it's because you're at least a little interested in this stuff.  So why don't you start a blog and join the conversation?  It's a mighty wide swimming hole, and there's always room for more. 

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