Did I hear myself correctly? Because it sounded like it has been ten years since I wrote these words:
"Greetings Fantasy book lovers and/or guests!! Welcome to my Hall. Come, sit back and relax – maybe have a mug of ale (though I prefer water and apple cider) – while I tell you about myself.
My name is Ian, called the Riddle Maker due to my love of inventing riddles, and I have begun this blog because so many of my friends have said that I should (or would be good at such) that I can ignore them no longer; their statements derived from my Facebook posts regarding my reading and general obsession with Fantasy books and the genre at large. I cannot promise that this blog will be any more edifying that my Facebook posts, and it certainly will not be a bunch of standard Fantasy book reviews. Think of this thus as a public diary of sorts – a record of my subsequent and continued journey through the Realm of the Fantastic."
Honestly I can scarcely believe I am writing this. As stated in the quoted Welcome Post, I first started Stars Uncounted - Ian's Fantasy Bookshelf at the ceaseless urging of my friends to do so back in college and, despite my bold tone, I never believed the blog would last this long – much less gain any kind of audience. Now I am a school librarian, an author of Epic Fantasy, and someone whom other authors very occasionally ask to review their books. Had anyone told me this was my mostly humble blog's fate (because it began as entirely if not below humble) I would have thanked them for their faith in me while laughing on the inside. Even now, at the beginning of every year, I am amazed I find enough to write about each month! I guess, as usual, J.R.R. Tolkien spoke true: "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
So
here we are and, much as I would like to wax poetic about this monumental 10th Anniversary moment, I actually wrote this post back in January and set it to automatically publish itself today because I was afraid I would forget when the time came. Point of order, one of the reasons Stars Uncounted has seen a decade when most blogs never do is because it is not a standard review site. Because it is a public diary of sorts, it relies only on me. As Sarkhan Vol said: "Do you understand that you must always fail, as long as your goal is not truth, but guidance? That as long as you seek dragons around you, you will never become the dragon within you?" Wise words, even if the man in question took the whole "dragon within you" part a bit too literally. So I will simply say: a toast to another ten years! Goodness knows I am not going anywhere.
"Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold...The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveler who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost." - J.R.R. Tolkien
“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” - C.S. Lewis
"Only thin, weak thinkers despise fairy stories. Each one has a true, strange fact hidden in it, you know, which you can find if you look." - Diana Wynne Jones
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