On My Third Year on WordPress…

December is rapidly slipping away and taking stock of the year about to end is something most of us tend to do. Here’s yet another reminder – a nice one, this time. Three years on WordPress… Thank you all for putting up with me for 12 more months! Thank you for your support and encouragement! And thank you for sharing your wonderful stories and opinions, for drawing me into your worlds each time I read your posts.

It was this third year of blogging that gave me the opportunity to put together and self-publish a collection of short stories, which started off as posts on this site. It was also this year of blogging that led to a very interesting collaboration (more on that and the book that resulted at a later time). So thank you for reading and since Christmas is near, here’s my small gift to you – you can download Parallel Lives and Glass Slippers and Stilettos for free until the end of the year.

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/analinden

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/ana+linden?_requestid=538455

https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/search?query=Ana%20Linden&fcsearchfield=Author

and on iBooks.

Happy reading!

On a different note, I took a quick look and these are the three posts that people were most interested in during this third year on WordPress:

1. Vicious Circles

As soon as that much desired snow covered everything, it seemed that those to complain about it most bitterly were the very people demanding it the loudest a week ago. Who would have thought?… Forget about that white fairytale-like magic so craved over Christmas, now it’s all about freezing cold, snow and ice covered roads, impossible traffic… and the cold, oh the cold… and did I mention the cold? I must have – after all, that’s what everybody keeps talking about.

We’re children at heart, really… we must be, since we constantly trap ourselves in the same vicious circles, even if we know better by now. Read more…

2. Glass Half Empty, Half Full, Or No Glass At All?

I may be able to come up with quite a variety of words to describe myself, but ‘optimist’ is not amongst them. I’m a realist. And as a realist, I cannot help having my moments of stifling pessimism, just as I also cannot help having hopes and dreams from time to time. As for that one person of the two who know me in real life, and have also been told about this blog – no, I don’t suffer from multiple personality disorder either… Or if I do, the one typing right now certainly has no idea about it. But we’ll go back to that later.

If you believe yourself to be a realist, then most likely you have often been accused of negative thinking and you’ve been labelled a pessimist more times than you can remember. Read more…

3. Down To Earth Or Up In The Clouds

As children, many of us are often told we can do anything and become whoever we want, when we grow up. Then we start growing up. With every year that passes, more and more of those options are stricken off that imaginary list. We discover ourselves, we understand what doesn’t suit us, we figure out what we don’t want to or cannot do. Whether we like it or not, we learn that wanting something doesn’t necessarily mean we can find a way to get it, contrary to urban legends and positive thinking myths. Yet we keep going, we still plan ahead and we find new purposes every day, because the present and the past are not enough, we also need some sort of hope for the future we can hold on to. Read more…

I hope it’s been a decent year for all of you. Happy Holidays!