Ah, August. We miss you already. The nights were warmer, the kids hadn’t started school, and Alice still hadn’t discovered those new paperback collections I tried to hide in the garage. It was a simpler time, a happier time. A time when I didn’t have to sleep on the couch.

Black Gate bloggers were busy in August, too. We posted 105 new articles last month, and our faithful servers in the back room worked overtime delivering 1.28 million pages views… a new record. That’s a page every two seconds, 24 hours a day. Don’t you people ever sleep?

The most popular article last month was Nick Ozment’s review of the blockbuster film The Guardians of the Galaxy. No surprise — it’s well on its way to becoming the biggest film of the year. It’s a terrific science fantasy that could well become this generation’s Star Wars.

Second on the list was Robert J Howe’s reminiscence of his time in various writer’s groups, Writer’s Workshops: Under the Black Flag. Third was Lou Anders’ article on his breakout middle grade fantasy Thrones & Bones: Why I Write What I Write How I Write it.

Fourth on the list was Matthew David Surridge’s report from the fabulous Montreal film festival, My Fantasia Festival, Day 10: Once Upon a Time in Shanghai and Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart. Rounding out the Top Five was Connor Gormley’s feature review of Karl Edward Wagner’s sword & sorcery classic Dark Crusade.

For this month, I tried something a little different by also including the top Categories. The biggest surprise was that one of the top items on the list (at #4, higher than any of the categories except New Treasures and Books) was the RSS feed for our Tuesday blogger James Maliszewski. Way to bring in the crowds, James!

The complete Top 50 Black Gate posts and categories in August were:

1. New Treasures
2. Film Review: Guardians of the Galaxy is Space Opera at its Best
3. Category/Books
4. James Maliszewski/feed
5. Category/Blog entry
6. Writer’s Workshops: Under the Black Flag
7. Lou Anders: Why I Write What I Write How I Write it
8. Category/Reviews
9. My Fantasia Festival, Day 10: Once Upon a Time in Shanghai and Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart
10. Bloody Battles, Espionage, Dark and Beautiful Prose, & Lovecraftian Horror: A Review of Karl Edward Wagner’s Dark Crusade

     

11. My Fantasia Festival — Tales From the Screening Room: Real, Black Butler, and The One I Love
12. Diversity in Fandom: Lessons from Worldcon
13. Art of the Genre: When an Old School Mind Learns How to Play D&D 5th Edition
14. 25 Ways to Support (Indie) Authors
15. Category/Fiction
16. Category/Editor’s Blog
17. Category/Game Reviews
18. The Scorpion Revealed: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter Twelve: Captain Marvel’s Secret
19. GenCon 2014 – Part 3: Pathfinder, Pathfinder, and More Pathfinder
20. Playing in Laird Barron’s Sandbox: The Children of Old Leech

     

21. What Would it Look Like to Pull a Watchmen on Planetary Romance? Part I
22. The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: RPGing with a board — Runebound
23. My Inspiration: Black Canaan
24. Writing a Fantasy Series
25. The Series Series: Sword of the Bright Lady by M.C. Planck
26. Collecting Lovecraft
27. New Treasures: Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, Volume One, Adapted by P. Craig Russell
28. Category/Art of the Genre
29. The Powerful Geek
30. Category/Movie

     

31. The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in July
32. Category/Comics
33. Category/News
34. Lord Dunsany and the Billiards Club
35. GenCon 2014 – Part 1: Boosting the Signal
36. LonCon 3 Report: Attending the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention
37. My Fantasia Festival, Day 11 (part 2): To Be Takei and The Creeping Garden
38. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz
39. Celebrating 1 Million Page Views: The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in July
40. Category/Art

     

41. Ancient Worlds: Everything You Learned About the Epic of Gilgamesh – and Promptly Forgot
42. The Huffington Post on Fantasy Series Better Than Harry Potter
43. Category/Conan
44. Category/Interviews
45. Category/Convention Report
46. Category/Magazines
47. My Fantasia Festival Wrap-up
48. The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Those Sweet Silver Blues: Garrett, PI
49. Category/Contest
50. Experience the Second Era of Space with Mindjammer

The Top 5o Black Gate blog posts in July are here and you can see all 105 posts we made in the month of August here.