I’ve now been blogging for a total of three years. That is pretty incredible – it doesn’t seem a week since I first posted on The LBSC, let alone since I first went independent. It’s always difficult to know what to post for these parochial, ever so slightly meaningless anniversaries.

My first anniversary of posting was met with this post, and the announcement that those first hundred posts were to be released in a very limited-edition book, Tilly Talks, which has long since sold out. On this third anniversary, I can (in a somewhat bemused way) announce that the book is currently in the process of being extensively re-edited, and will be out on general release later this year (though hopefully not too much later!) as The Tilly O’Shea Thing. The idea of me having a book out in the shops is so bizarre that I’m not saying much more about it until it’s released – and then, readers here will be the first to know.

My second anniversary was marked with a revisit of my 99-point list of ambitions. Given that most have them have changed, and that reading the list is rather tedious, I’ve decided not to do that.

Instead, I’m just going to post a few facts and figures. Over three years, I’ve made 871 posts – a bit less than one a day – consisting of almost 200,000 words – about 175 per day, or about a novel a year. Over the last year, the site’s popularity has astounded me. In the year May 2004 to April 2005, the site received 378,630 hits – at the time, I thought that was phenomenal, showing as it does over 1,000 hits per day. From May 2005 to April 2006, the site received 1,573,243 hits. One and a half million! That’s well over 4,000 per day! Where are all of these people coming from, and what do they want with my random ramblings?

Anyway, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of my readers for their ongoing support. If you’re still here in three years’ time, hopefully I will be too!