Since the last update I went to the Doors Into the Dark: A Day of Weird Fiction event in the Seamus Heaney centre in Belfast where I got to see tons of authors speak and also got to meet and chat to Sam Thompson, Damien Kelly, Jo Zebedee, and Stephen Daly in person.

Following on from Reggie Chamberlain King's opening lecture on older authors of speculative fiction from Northern Ireland, I decided to an Historic authors section to the top of the site. You can now directly view authors there who passed away more than 25 years ago.

Since then there have also been some big updates here. I've added a Calendar view to the events section, where you can visualize upcoming events a little better.

As for authors, we've added (deep breath) James Corbett, Mary Fortune, R H Wright, Robert Cromie, Thomas Mayne Reid, Forrest Reid, Rosa Mulholland, Herbert Moore Pim, Frances Browne, Beatrice Grimshaw, and Bob Shaw as historic authors.

As more current ones, we've added Kelly McCaughrain, T O Munro, C J Cooke, and Dara Kavanagh.

Authors added since the last update: Andrew Brehony, Ann Marie O'Sullivan, Dara Kiernan, Dixon Reuel, Christopher Galvin, Ciara O'Connor, Damien Kelly and the late John Farrelly, the Northern Irish comic artist and illustrator behind the Deadly Irish History books, who died last October.

Elsewhere, a good few gaps in existing author pages have been filled in - books and series for Sarah Rees Brennan, Shane Hegarty, Sarah Maria Griffin and Alex Dunne, with covers to match. Chapters Bookstore joins the list of shops an author's books can be searched for.

The map and the directory can now be linked to directly, so /map/sligo opens the map with Sligo selected, /county/sligo goes straight to that county's authors, and /genre/horror does the same for a genre.

I've added a small mountain of talented authors to the site since August.

Added Ger Moane, Gillian O'Rourke, Ila Quinn, John De Burca, Geraldine Mills, Gerard Murphy, K Anderson Brady, Leeanne O'Donnell, Oran Doyle, Sean Butler, Tanya Farrelly, Byddi Lee, Stephen Daly, Rosemary Jenkinson and Siobhán F Murphy.

I've also spent a lot of time going over the data and trying to fill in any gaps vis-a-vis social links, broken links, bios, photos, missing books, and crucially the links for those books - every author's books should now link to a place where they can actually be bought, as opposed to previously where some were linking to generic searches.

Today is the one year anniversary of sffauthors.ie launch. This time a year ago I launched this site as a directory of fantasy and sf authors. At the time I think we had less than 50. Sadly, I didn't keep a count. But now we have almost 200!

Every time I think we have all the authors added, I find a bunch more hiding in some dark corner of the internet. If I ever get to 250 we'll have another celebration.

Updated styles a little for events, and news.

Added Paul Anthony Shortt, Tracy Fahey, Nina Oram, Robert J Power, J M Lane, Paraic O'Donnell and K A Finn. Welcome aboard everyone.

Books can now be grouped into series, which makes pages for some of the very prolific authors a little cleaner.

I've also added "mini" events to the events list - these are for things like book signings, one off small things with a single author involved, rather than big multi-day festivals. Gareth Hanrahan has the honour of being the first.

Some small updates. Probably the biggest one is this news section! From now on, if I make any updates, or if there's any news about authors or events on the list, It'll appear here. I'm also going to backdate some entries from a blog I wrote that wasn't working

Recent improvments:

• new "list" mode on the author directory
• random books feature
• added some missing social links
• map color improvements
• added Conor Forrest, Sue Rainsford, Laura Keohane, Ruth Ennis, Anna D McCabe, Rohan O'Duill, Frances Quinn, Laura-Louise Slattery, and A A Hanlon

I also corrected a terrible injustice done to Ruth Frances Long, where she only had two books listed, and they weren't even hers, due to a data glitch. I've now fixed this. Apologies to Ruth!