THIS! IS! 500!!!!! Thanks, and the top ten list

Cedar

This is the 500th post for this blog.

We've done a LOT since last time.

The Pius Trilogy has finally come to an end.  Each of the books, A Pius Man, A Pius Legacy, and A Pius Stand have all had great reviews, with only one prick who decided that I had kicked his puppy or something. Though if he really wants Sad Puppies, go here.  Cedar, Larry Correia and Sarah Hoyt can really make puppies cry. MUAHAHAHAHAHA

Margot

I'm sorry, where was I?  I was distracted by crying puppies.

Oh, yes, 500 posts.

I've been trying to sell these books since 2007, and I've been running this blog -- or vice versa -- since 2010.

Because of it, I've made some great friends, like Sarah Hoyt,  Ann Margaret Lewis, Karina Fabian, Daniella Bova, Daria Anne DiGiovanni, Margot St. Aubin, and Matt Bowman, the Novel Ninja.

I've read some awesome books, like Amy Lynn, Ordinance 93, The Watson Chronicles, the Book of Helen, Stealing Jenny, and a whole slough of others. Slew? Slough? Oh, you get the idea.

Kia

And these people.  Wow.

Heck, due to Kia Heavey, I have a new model for Manana Shushurin, now that the previous model is far, far too respectable to be associated with the likes of me.  She was before, but I guess she finally figured that out. :)  Kia is an author, and I recommend her books. Heck, I have.

Ann and Karina have been responsible for dragging me into the Catholic Writer's Guild. And if they weren't (it's been so long, they may not have), they're a large chunk of the reason I stay.

There's the CLFA, and that's also a long story.

Margot was largely responsible for the gun shop visit of 2014, and accompanied me to the Catholic Writers Guild conference that I was a guest at.

I've lost some good friends.  One of my first beta readers for A Pius Man died before it was published. The first artist for the site, with whom I was acquaintances since college, and I drifted apart.


This blog caught me one of my best friends, author Rebekah Hendershot, and we managed to burn that bridge, with each other still on it. Heck, we burned that bridge so thoroughly, I think I've completely edited her out of the history of the website, with perhaps one exception.

Yeah. When things go badly, they go badly.

This blog has gotten me some of the best things in my life, and has taken away a few.  It's been a bumpy ride, almost from day one.

Along the way, I've shared with you how I invest myself in my work, dissected my life to show you how it enters my writing, given you the story of everything that has been important in my life. You folks know when I'm single, when I'm hurting, and when I'm going to lose myself in video games.

Mandy

I've shared my wonder at emerging technology, my irritation at politics and the comic book industry, my love of reading and even the music du jour.

I'd like to thank you all for putting up with me that long. I never thought I was that interesting.  This blog has lasted has still longer than some relationships I've had.

And now, I have an almost constant readership of some 3000 people a month, give or take a few hundred.

Now if only you would all buy The Pius Trilogy and Codename Winterborn....

Yes, I'm joking.  But you can't blame a guy for trying, can you? :)

Looking back on some of the strangeness, these are the all-time top blogs ever read on this site as of this minute.

1) Who would Captain America vote for? An election special: Written back for the Presidential election of 2012, I was fed up with politics, and thought it much more amusing to speculate on what comic book characters would vote for who. I still like it better than most modern politics.  The hits on this one equal an entire month of viewership on the blog.

2) Sex, DC Comics, and ... wtf?  This was a strange one. Right after the dawn of DC's New 52 in 2011, the comics had gone into a sideways spiral of strange. I think this had something to do with sex being in the title.

3) Waaaay back in 2010, I ripped apart all of the Disasters to Marvel At: A Comic Discussion, with every stupid decision that Marvel comics had made for the previous 5 years.  Sadly, some of those decisions are still going strong.

4) Snarky Theology 4: "Things that go boink in the night."  You may remember that for Easter of 2011, I had tried to play nice and explain my faith, and tenets of Catholicism to the average person.  That ended in disaster and a flame war, and a few other things going wrong alone the way.  But, once again, Sex scores well on the site. Strange for a blog all about Catholic thrillers.

5) Recommended Reading; Larry Correia.  This one wasn't even a week old when it's shot up to the top of the charts. It's already the most read blog in the last month. God only knows what it'll do in the next 12 months.  This is what happens when you review an awesome, awesome novelist, and he, in turns, shares your work with every single one of his followers.

If Correia wasn't a great writer, he'd probably be popular because he's an awesome person.

He's also someone I would never have discovered without this blog, and selling my books.

6) Top ten Pius Blog posts, March 2014: Politics, sex and comic books...  I don't need to explain much about this, do I? Thankfully, the top-ten list still includes a lot of sex and politics.

7) Self defense review: Zombies, Women's self defense, 10 / 2011...  My self defense column from Examiner.com has been offline for two years now, and this post (which was merely a collection of links TO those articles) is still going strong.

I don't get it either.

8) Black Friday blog: book shopping.  This came out late LATE last November, and it's already hit the top ten.  Not bad, eh?


9) SFCS -- "Strong Female Character Syndrome."  In the summer of 2013, someone made a dumbass mistake of insulting females in fiction, solely on the basis of their ability with weaponry and fighting.  While I could have gone along if they were against poorly designed characters that are only "strong," they went a few steps beyond that.

10) Someone has jumped the shark: women and military science fiction ...A year before the above article, someone at Tor decided to put a hit out on everything Baen, charging "sexism" on the scantest, stupidest, not-even-there evidence. Then I went postal.