I’ll post a recap of the year’s best reads tomorrow, followed by a look ahead on New Year’s Day.  But because there have been some big changes in my small corner of the blogosphere, I thought I’d give a short recap.

You’ll notice that I’ve used the plural form of the word “blog” in the title of this post.  That’s because I’ve got four of them.  (Yes, I’m nuts.) 

The year started out good.  Blog traffic continued to climb.  By July traffic was setting records.  Nearly every post had comments, and the number of followers was slowly growing.  I found all of this very satisfying, especially the comments, since a community of regulars had formed.  There were some great discussions.  Blurbs from Adventures Fantastic were starting to show up on the covers of books by major publishers.  I was having a lot of fun, which was a large part of why I do this.

Then Google decreed that Adventures Fantastic was a spam site.  I’m not quite sure how they figured that since I went over their guidelines with a fine toothed comb.  And while I did include a number of links to other sites, Google was very clear that sites which include  links in reviews weren’t spam.  The automatic response to the appeal I lodged with Google said it would be several weeks before they even looked at it. Continue reading →