So hi.  I wanted to let you, the literally tens of regular readers, know a few things.

1) At the current pace I anticipate wrapping up Le Morte D’Arthur sometime around the beginning of May of 2014.  It may go longer or it may run short of that, but that is my current best guess.

2) I am going to be doing NaNoWriMo this year, which starts tomorrow.  This shouldn’t affect Primary Sources; currently I have all of November’s Primary Sources entries set up and loaded.

2a) Normally I would be spending the month of November writing December’s entries, so, I admit it’s not impossible there will be an interruption in service at the start of December.

3) After some thought, I’ve decided to take down the collection I put up on Amazon last January (it may be down already, or the unpublishing may still be propagating through Amazon’s systems), which included my Book I and Book II coverage.  While I’m ultimately pretty pleased with it, there were a number of things about that process I’d do differently.

3a) I hope, once I’ve covered all of Le Morte D’Arthur, to put it back up for free, alongside $0.99 or $1.99 ebook versions of the other seven volumes in the projected set (Books III and IV, Books V, VI, and VII, Books VIII, IX, and X spread across two volumes, Books XI through XIV, Books XV through XVIII, and Books XIX to XXI).  The odd breakup is to keep each volume at around 36000 words.

3b) These putative future ebook editions will be lovingly polished, unlike the hurried blog posts available here, and who knows, maybe I’ll hire someone to edit it or lay it out professionally or both.  But that won’t be a thing I seriously tackle until I’ve completed Le Morte D’Arthur, barring some change in plans.

4) I still plan on covering Romance of the Three Kingdoms after I’ve completed Le Morte D’Arthur.

5) Readership numbers have been more or less flat since January, when due to a link on Metafilter the number of unique weekly visitors to the site almost doubled (from a low number to a slightly less low number).  Really, this is to y’all’s benefit, since there’s little motivation to add advertisements or a donation button or WHAT THE HELL MERLIN? t-shirts.  While I can’t deny I was kind of hoping that after over a year of this, I’d have attracted more of an audience, the consensus seems to be that the number of people particularly interested in my Le Morte D’Arthur coverage could about fill a smallish restaurant.  Which no, is not enough to get me to stop.  More readers would be nice, but I assume you’ve already told all your friends.

5a) Back in May, as you may recall, I took a month off from Sir Thomas Malory in favor of H.P. Lovecraft and the Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.  This affected my readership not at all.  Readership did bog down a bit in the logy back half of Sir Tristram’s horrible saga, but seems to have snapped back.

6) Most of the search results that lead people to my site (that I can see, anyway) are for people searching for the titles and authors of the short stories I’ve reviewed from Asimov’s (probably but not necessarily the authors themselves).  Every so often, though, a search like “WHAT HAPPENS IN LE MORTE D’ARTHUR BOOK IV” shows up, which warms my heart.

6a) Special note to the authors of the short stories I’ve reviewed from Asimov’s: in general y’all do great work. When a story doesn’t work for me, I try to identify why, but it isn’t a slight on the story; it’s mostly for my own benefit as I continue to improve my own writing.  The only story I’ve out-and-out disliked since I started reading Asimov’s was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula, so, that’s how much I know.