What you now see before you is the 100th post at BillWardWriter.com. It took almost a year, which averages out to a little less than two posts a week — not exactly setting the web on fire.

However, for much of the life of this site I was creating four to eight posts per month. But since I’ve switched gears and begun to take the blogging thing a bit more seriously (but not too seriously, it still feels a bit like talking to myself in the mirror while shaving) my posts per week reflect that.

So, I expect number 200 should come sometime in March or April — just in time for my one year anniversary as an online reviewer. Coincidence? Yes, absolutely. But it certainly feels as if I’ve come a long way from my first post here, where I insisted I was not going to blog.

Anyway, I’m happy with the shape of things, and am happier still I’ve managed to reach some readers that share my passion for genre fiction. My hat is off to you, oh gentle reader — thanks for stopping by.

Once upon a chronologic interval, back at the beginning of this site, actually, I had some different ideas about what this place was all about. That’s when I fully expected the power of my own magnetism to draw you in to read the two or three posts I posted every month about what stories I had sold and where. Well, shit. Even I didn’t read those posts.

So call it official, call it a blog. Yes, I still think it’s a monstrous act of egotism — but I just had to come to terms with being a monster, that’s all.

Now that BillWardWriter.com is ‘officially’ a blog you can expect more content and — if you can stand it — more me. The focus of this site will not change — science fiction, fantasy, and horror all the way — but there will be more in the way of links to curiosities, writing tips, personal anecdotes, rants, raves, and gonzo-style journalistic accounts of events that never transpired (maybe not so much of that, actually), and more generally newsie posts of the kind I think the hypothetical e-you might enjoy. I don’t plan on limiting myself to just print media, either, though books are king around here and always will be.

So yes, like all monsters that require electricty and enthusiasm, my blog is about to run amok all over your tiny black-and-white village, until of course you decide to band together and scare it away with fire. But until that happens, I’m all over your asses with genre goodness.

Well, perhaps that’s a bit grandiose, but over the last week or so I have worked a major overhaul on the site (much of which should be obvious to returning visitors) and feel as if I’ve moved up a notch in my understanding of how all this wordpress blogging stuff works. Doesn’t mean I can do half of it with any degree of expertise, but at least I know where to go for answers now.

The most obvious change around here is the new theme, the beautiful and very functional Thesis premium wordpress theme from Chris Pearson. It has a lot of great features under the hood that make things easier for me, considerable customization options, and great typography. It’s increased my enthusiasm for this site tenfold. Expect further tweaks in the coming weeks and months as I get a handle on how it all works.

One big change is I’m now using a feedburner account for my RSS feed — so if you have already subscribed to my feed please resubscribe, as you’ll have a better experience.

I’ve also spent a great deal of time changing my permalinks from the original ugly ‘?p=356′ type that I carelessly started the site with, to the more attractive and functional (and google friendly) links you see here today. A note to anyone that attempts to do the same — please do some searching on the web first and get the necessary plug in and details as to how to tweak your links, otherwise you are looking at a real mess.

Anyway, between trawling my site for old links and raking the html code on various posts and pages to eliminate detritus, to installing little niceties like the welcome message new visitors will see and getting set-up with google analytics and feedburner — even after all that tedium, I have to say this is actually more fun than I ever imagined. It is my hope that visitors will agree the effort was worth it.

And if you should see any glitches, 404s, or monsters-under-the-bed around here please contact me and let me know, it will be greatly appreciated.

All this activity, of course, also means I have bigger plans for the future than what you’ve seen so far here at BillWardWriter.com. So grab an RSS feed and keep your virtual eyeballs peeled for future updates.