Last day of the year, I find myself driven out of bed at 5 am to look back at 2017, and to say hey to readers who have been checking in here. We’re up over 20,000 views per month — a far cry from pop-culture blogging numbers, but I’ll take it. And I’ll defer to the “overview stats” page at the back of this blog to offer up an orderly, top-five guide through the past year. . . .

• — Our most popular posting? Let’s invite Scotland to join Canada. That idea morphed into a 640-word  opinion piece in the Globe and Mail . . . and then went what passes for viral in my little world. Two stories each in BBC News and The Scotsman. One each in The Independent, The Daily Mail, The Week. Pick-ups in Chinese, Estonian, Spanish (Castillian & Catalan), and Portuguese. Here at home, multiple TV appearances, several radio spots. Before it ended, I was turning down interviews — a fact that those who know me will find hard to believe. I got a special kick out of writing a follow-up entitled ‘Obscure’ Canadian writer declines to don kilt for CTC appearance. That happened in April. In June, Sheena and I went researching in Scotland. My biggest hit from that trip was The ‘most hated man in Scotland’ is killing my buzz in the Highlands.

  

• — Number two posting: A younger male writer crosses swords with Margaret Atwood. The fight began on Twitter, where I wrote that I am proud to be part of what future scholars will call The Atwood Generation of Canadian writers. She objected: “Now Ken. You are WAY younger than me!” That drove me to reprise what I had written about Atwood in 50 Canadians Who Changed the World — a book that did well when it surfaced in 2013, but probably appeared four years too early. (Pic from when she joined us on the picket line at the Calgary Herald.)
• — Post number three I wrote in September: Here’s why we’re excited to visit the site of Franklin’s found Erebus. We were about to embark on a voyage Out of the Northwest Passage with Adventure Canada. To explain my excitement, I offered up a dazzling excerpt from my then-forthcoming book Dead Reckoning. In December, in a post called Lighting the Kudlik in the Northwest Passage, I revealed that we sailed into a blizzard that prevented us from diving on the Erebus. I tell that story at length in the next issue of Geographical magazine, which comes out of the UK from the Royal Geographical Society. Oh, and let’s not forget that superb 3-minute video that emerged out of our visit to Beechey Island.

  

• — In fourth place: Advance readers discover ‘a brilliant reclaiming of history.’ Yes, Dead Reckoning again. Book promotion took us on a hugely enjoyable western tour: Calgary, Victoria, Vancouver. The most intelligent reviews earned a spot in this blog: Dead Reckoning hailed as transformative masterpiece and Our Hero sacrifices modesty to preserve insightful review.
• — Our fifth and final spot goes to 2019 John Rae Arctic Return Expedition rockets into cyberspace. Two related posts also garnered a lot of attention: Arctic Return Expedition will seek Northwest Passage in the footsteps of John Rae and Arctic Return Expedition backs Orkney vision of a John Rae World Heritage Site. 

And so we beat on, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, like boats against the tide, borne back ceaselessly into the past . . . .

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