Tag Archives: fantasy

Posts and Popularity

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I don’t always blog, but when I do, I write the whole thing minutes before it’s due. And so here I am, sitting and thinking about what to write, and for the life of me I can’t think of a thing.

Then it occurred to me to check back over what my most popular posts have been in the past, to see if there’s any inspiration to be had. And something interesting (to me, anyway), showed up. I’ve had two posts featured by WordPress, so naturally they’ve been the most popular overall, but ignoring those, there’s one post that’s been popular ever since I first published it nearly four years ago. Back in 2012, I was experimenting with different blog topics, and one theme I had running for a while was something called Tales of Despair. I would try to write weekly about a work of art, music or story that was deeply invested in darkness and despair, and one week I chose to write about Hieronymus Bosch’s famous painting, Garden of Earthly Delights.

The Garden of Earthly Delights Low Resolution

I wrote a pretty lengthy piece on the various pieces of the painting, focusing on some of the more bizarre details, and ultimately centering on the ‘hell’ portion of the work. It wasn’t terribly popular on publication, garnering only a few hits and likes. In fact, to this day I still only have eight likes for the article.

However, it’s the most-viewed post I’ve ever written, short of the two featured posts I mentioned before. Since September 2012, it’s had over 1,000 hits; that’s roughly a hit a day, every day, for four years. It consistently shows up in my weekly reports as one of the most popular posts that week. The funny thing is, I can’t quite understand why. If I search ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ on Google I don’t get anything about my post; if I search images, I equally get nothing.

So a bit of a mystery remains around this one: why has it been so consistently popular for over four years? Not one of my other posts comes even close—the next most popular is (oddly enough) another Tales of Despair article about Pieter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death, at roughly half the hits.

What do you think? Was it really a good article? Is it because of the snippets of images in the article? Why is everyone so interested in the Garden of Earthly Delights?

The Redemption of Erâth: No News This Week

Since I posted chapter fifteen of the third book last weekend, I have to admit I haven’t done a whole lot. In fairness, I don’t have much time to work on writing during the week, and I was away last weekend visiting family in Portland, Oregon. So although I haven’t achieved any writing, here’s a picture of a lovely river we went to in Washington state.

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Many thanks, and hopefully I’ll have more of an update for you next week!

The Redemption of Erâth: Book Three, Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen: The Namirèn

The Sleeping Death, as it came to be known, did not come to Courerà that year, or the next. With the help of the courts, Elven and Gwendolyn banned all travel across the kingdom, unless it was a direct matter of life and death. The great gate to Erârün was shut, and Kiriün became a sealed kingdom indeed. Camps were set up at the entrances to all the largest towns, and healers—under the watchful eye of soldiers—monitored all who entered and left for signs of illness. Many were turned away; food became scarce in the capital, and even the rich grew hungry. Word of illegal trade in luxuries reached the ears of the courts, but to Elven it was a small price to pay to keep the plague at bay.

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