This Chapel was built as a Memorial to Aircrew, who had their lives taken in World War ll, they fought and they died. 

We, today, have the freedom to forget.

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/73191

It's time for me to look back on 2014 and see just how things went. Check out the Highs and the Lows and reflect on how things have gone..

2014 as most of you reading this will know is the year I finally published my first novel; George and the Dragon.

While sales of the book continue to tick over I've generally been slightly disappointed with them and now realise my expectations were probably set a little high.  While I didn't expect to set the world on fire with my sales I did think I could sell a fair number more than I have.

This will not stop me publishing more works in the future it just makes me realise how hard you have to work for each sale of your book. 

But that is then and I should really go way back to the beginning of the year. Once I was sure I was going to publish the novel I started to ramp up my on-line presence in preparation for the big launch which happened on 23 April 2014, St George's Day.

I started this blog on 31 January 2014 with a post titled 'Here be dragons'.

To start with I wrote on the blog daily, however, more recently it's been harder for me to think of interesting things to write so I'm guilty of neglecting my blog.  However, I'm going to change that in the new year and post 3 times a week Mondays, Fridays and on one other random day as well. 

This should hopefully bring the blog back to life again. Not that the blog is really dead, since it's inception it's had over 17,000 page views that's a little over 1,500 page views a month. Last month it had 2000 page views.  So it's fairly healthy I just need to keep the content coming.

On top of the blog I started a Facebook page, a Twitter Account, a Google + account, a Pinterest account and a Good Reads account. I'll write more about my experience with each of these and my plans for the future over the coming weeks.

I created www.georgeandthedragon.co.uk to start with I didn't have anything to put on the site so I created a fake Newspaper from the time with references to scenes in the book.

You can still view this news paper here: http://georgeandthedragon.co.uk/marketing/the-london-evening-mercury/  

I am, to this day, still quite proud of this and have a plan to do something similar with book 2 of the Knights of the Sky series.

Alongside the website for the book I also created my own personal website: www.philiptolhurst.co.uk and used a similar template for both sites. 2015 will see many more websites being created as I produce one for the sequel, for the Knights of the Sky series and other works I have planned.  

My second published work was in the charity anthology Lupus Animus.

This anthology is full of stories, poems and Haiku about wolves and all the proceeds raised go to go to Artisan Rarebreeds. Registered Charity Number: HMRC XT37297. So it's well worth a purchase.

I missed the deadline for the third project I was hoping to be a part of but I know they are planning a sequel to their anthology so I will submit my story for that when the time comes and use the time in between to hone my story and edit it close to perfection :)

NaNoWriMo was a success for me this year. I crafted a story around my take on the Elf, Dwarf, Human and Orc storyline that Tolkien wrote about in his works.  The novel details the transition of the elves from beautiful cities to wood fairing folk while the humans leave the woods and start to build cities.  It's the fall of one civilization to be replace by another. It features far more adult content that I would write about in the Knights of the Sky series with the first chapter featuring a scene depicting inter-racial sexual violence. Whether I ever publish it or not is a question for the future but the story is strong so it maybe worth revisiting with an editors pen in hand.

That's a brief summation of the year gone by, join me next time as I look forward to the future and detail my plans for 2015. 

Have a fantastic 2015 everyone.

Phil

I've just written an update on my NaNoWriMo progress on my Facebook page

It's NaNo time people!  What's that some of you are bound to ask.

NaNoWriMo stands for the National Novel Writing Month.  It's a personal challenge to write a novel of a minimum length of 50,000 words in a Month.

That breaks down to 1,667 words per day.

This year, like the last 2 years, I am actively participating.

However, at the weekend I found myself travelling down to see my parents to celebrate Guy Fawkes or Bonfire night in Newick which is near Lewes in Sussex.

They know how to celebrate Bonfire Night in Sussex with each village having their own Bonfire Society and Lewes, I understand, having 6 of them.

 

Not a bad display for a tiny Sussex village: http://www.newickbonfire.com/

Because of this my start to this years NaNo was delayed somewhat and I missed a whole day of writing.  But I confess I was aware of this heading into this years month of frenetic wordsmithing.

Sunday I was when my personal NaNo started with a total of 2510 words.

Today I have wrote a further 1168 on the train journey into work this morning.

By the close of today I need to have written at least 5000 words to remain on track so still  a fair number of words to write and less time to do it in than I had on Sunday.

Don't forget I'm trying to raise funds for the NaNo project and you can sponsor my endeavours here:

https://www.classy.org/fundraise?fcid=359920

Thanks

Phil