Well, the New Year is almost upon us, and so it’s time again that I’d like to look back at the year and see what I did with this blog and website in 2024.  I did the same thing last year (which you can see here if you’d like) and, because I am lazy, I think I’ll stick to the same format as last time.  Then, anyone who wants to do a side-by-side comparison of the two years (or am I the only weirdo who likes to do that?) can do so handily.

General Accomplishments:

This is my second year with this site and I am really slow about putting new, big projects together, so my accomplishments this year might sound small and a little silly, but they made me really happy to do them (and I still have a list of further such sorts of little steps I’m hoping for for the future).  (Note, reducing my use of run-on sentences is not on the list, just so you know…)

1. I added a Tags Index page to my site.  It is my strong preference that people should be able to poke through for the sort of content that interests them when they’re visiting a site, so this was a high-priority item for me.  But, accomplishing it meant that I had to learn a little bit more about how WordPress works and, specifically, I had to figure out how to find and use a plugin (this one if you’re wondering).  Super-tiny baby-steps as far as web-development skills go, but forward-progress none-the-less!  That’s pretty much how I learn anything new…

2. I also added an FAQ page.  In a lot of ways this was more like just another blog post than a true site ‘Accomplishment!’, because blog- and writing-wise, I don’t think I’ve been actually asked any questions, let alone frequently.  But it was fun to make something up.  And it helped me build my illusion that I have a real website with all the trimmings.  (Note, I still don’t have all the trimmings yet, but this was one of them and we’re getting there.)

3. And, final page addition for the year, I added a Stories page!  This was also very high priority for me, because my writing is the biggest reason I’ve made this site.  But, so far, I’ve only got two stories out (the SSCS’s I published on this blog) that I can show people at all, and last year there was only one of them up, so I had to wait until this year before it wouldn’t be 100% ridiculous to have a Stories page on my website.  At the moment, it’s actually referencing three SSCS’s, but the third only has a couple sneak-peeks out so far (here and here; the first actual installment of SSCS-03 will be appearing January 3^rd 2025.

3b. In terms of further baby steps for web-development, I wanted to make sure I had some nice images to go with my story blurbs, etc., and I already mentioned in my last post how one of my story accomplishments this year was putting several new such images together.  On the technical side of things, that also involved learning at least a little bit about licensing images, since I can only manage so far with photos I’ve taken myself.  So far, I’ve only tried out Shutterstock, but I’m pretty pleased with what I was able to find and use from there.

4. Last, in 2024 I published a second SSCS story here on the blog, as part of my story-serials posting category.  I’ve listed the tone for How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters as ‘magical mayhem’, but you’ll have to decide for yourself whether that’s accurate.

Blog Content:

Next, onward to actual blog content.  Once again, I’m going to include my seasonal site-banner images for the year into this bit, because I am pretty fond of pretty pictures.  So far these are all photos I’ve taken myself.  I do like to take lots of pictures, but I don’t often do much with them.  This is a nice exception.

And, in terms of the posts I’ve put up this year, here’s what we’ve got for 2024:  In total (including this post), I’ve put up 128 posts.  51 of those have been the weekly garden posts, and 33 have been for my serialized stories, and then there’s the scattering of fly-by-postings.  So, all-in-all, that whittles down to just 22 regular-style blog posts for the year.  Fewer than last year (26) but on average actually a little longer than last year.

Here are links to my three favorites for this year, in alphabetical order.  If you read through them, strangely, you will find that two of those three reference Madagascar, and all I can say in defense of that is that these posts are all prompted by things I really like or am inspired by and, for whatever reason, Madagascar has been on that list since I was a little girl.

• Beloved Book of Trees
• The Lost Art of Video Stores
• Quirky (True) Stories: Volume 1

And, since I really like to tabulate information about my hobbies, further statistics about these posts are that (not including this one) they total about 26,000 words, they range in length from somewhere around 500 words up to 2000 words, with an average length of 1259 words, and a median length of 1370 words.  (Also, random aside and relative to last year, I seem to have substituted much in the way of crafting-hobby posts for instead more posts with pretty pictures of flowers.)

Below are links to the posts that happen to line up to the different post-length statistics for the year.  But note, there is something of a jumble when it comes to defining the shortest post.  Word-count-wise, the shortest post is this one:
MT Mountain Wildflowers
But it barely counts as a post, at least from a writing standpoint, because it’s just a bunch of pretty pictures with super-basic captions tacked on.  (Also, is it really a short post if a picture’s worth 1000 words?)  Then,
Some Thoughts and Offerings Regarding Ghost Stories
is the next-shortest post in terms of blog-post-original words (about 560).  But, to read it takes much longer than that because it contains over 1000 words of short-story excerpts.  So, the ‘shortest’ post listed below is the shortest one after eliminating those two.

• Longest: Twisters or: What Great Writing Can Do For You
• Median-Length: Introduce-the-Story-Themes: How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
• Closest-to-Average-Length: Light at the End of the Burnout
• Shortest: Story Ideas Are Cheap – An Example

Weekly Garden Content:

Last, because I do really like pretty pictures, and because the biggest category of posts to this site is actually my Weekly Garden Snapshots, here is a look-back of weekly-garden images from 2024.  First my favorite images for individual weeks.  And then my favorite seasonal-look-back compilation sets.

Happy 2024.  And here’s to 2025 and the New Year!