OK. Let’s start over. I started this blog a year ago as a way to archive my Twisters. It really started with that. I also thought it would be a good place to house some of the articles that were being written about me, and once in a while, it would be a place to collect my thoughts (did I just link you right back to this? Almost – you have no idea how close you came to an infinite loop). But mostly, it was about Twitter. I wanted to make my thousands of tweets searchable. That’s it. Why did I want to make them searchable? Why did Hillary climb Everest? I mean, what kind of a question is that? What? I’m the one who asked it? Oh.

Anyhow, this is how this site started. The search thing. In many ways, it’s why it continues.

In the past year, this site has received over 13,000 visits, and almost 30,000 page views.

Coming and going. The year in visits.

It has been visited by people from around the world. The top 4 countries: the US, Canada, India, and the UK. In the past year, one person from Myanmar visited this site. There was one person from Ethiopia. There were two from Trinidad and Tobago. I don’t know if they were from Trinidad or Tobago. Maybe both were from one of the islands. There were 17 from Bahrain. There were 46 from Italy. Thirteen percent of all the visitors came from Montreal (that’s what you call home-ice advantage – the first and only hockey reference, I swear). Six percent from Toronto. Four percent from New York. Three percent from London. Just a little under three percent from Mumbai.

I need to work on a Central Asian strategy - it's obvious now

I had trouble publishing a short story so I posted it here and 1,000 people read it – more than would have read it had I published it in a literary journal probably. That might be a good case for self-publishing. Or not. Ten percent of all the visitors to my site played around with my Twisters. The vast majority of page views come from my blog postings.

Myanmar. I find this indescribably cool. It might just be the coolest stat I found when researching this.

When I started this blog, I was about broken up with my old agent, and about six months ago was introduced to my new agent. He is now peddling my novel (something I’ve written about extensively here). There has been no resolution to this. I decided to go this route and these things take time. We live, of course, in a strange and exciting age for writers. Sort of like what was happening to musicians about a decade ago. Unless you were Metallica and sounding like the grandfather who still complained about color television and telex machines. Writers are moving from the hired help to the corner office. Kind of. Some of them. Hey, we can’t all write The Hunger Games. Or Fifty Shades of Grey.

In the past year, my Twitter followers have gone from 5 digits to 6 and though the pace of growth has slowed (considerably – I’m guessing Twitter has dropped me from some recommended user list, probably because I’m not a Kardashian [and here, really, if I had tried to look for a footnote plug-in I would have talked about having seen Bruce Jenner at the Olympics and Montreal and how weird is our world when he ends up being the emasculated patriarch of the Kardashian clan? How does this even happen? And let's not even bring up the plastic surgery!] or haven’t slept with one, at least not that I know of) my follower numbers continues to grow, inexorably, something I continue to find astonishing, and, honestly, I’m very very hard to surprise.

I have done this for a year and it’s a rather odd thing to go back and see what I’ve posted. Fiddling around with Google Analytics is fascinating in a weird way, like scuba diving, except there’s absolutely no risk of death, even in those long moments where you might stare at that Live Beta thing and no one, absolutely no one, is visiting your site. Wait, that’s not death, that’s a lonely empty feeling. That’s Friday night all alone with the TV and a tub of ice cream territory.

So, all this to say, thanks. Thanks for coming. Why you do is beyond me, but I stopped questioning people’s motivations a long time ago. Well, that’s not true, as a writer of fiction, I question motives all the time. All. The. Time. Let’s face it, I’m completely full of shit. But then again, you kind of have to be if you’re a writer of any sort.

There are no fireworks at the end here. Sorry. Though I bet there’s a fireworks plug-in, too. I really should figure out how to use this thing.

I would do the Shindig again, if only for all the people who couldn’t make it the first time. Perhaps I will. Until then, we can (and should) contemplate the aesthetics of the virtual book reading….

I think I got about 100 people. I don’t know what the final number was. My computer crashed about two minutes in and I’m sure I lost a boatload of people when that happened. Like you know how if you go to a zoo and you come across a cage and you can’t find the animals no matter how hard you look and if you can’t find them you give up and you move on? Like that. Being kicked out of my own reading by the vicissitudes of technology was awkward and a part of me wanted to just leave my desk and go grab a beer. I’m glad I didn’t. I had a thoroughly great time. There were people from all over the world attending the event. Fans of my work (more on this in a bit). Friends. I don’t know who (the only ones I’m sure of are those that asked questions) and 24 hours later I’m still discovering people who showed up. I read this story and then answered questions. I had a great time. Both reading (save for the computer crash) and answering the questions. The whole thing took an hour. It felt like ten minutes.

My view as the reading is about to start

But thinking about the turnout you kind of realize how hard it is to convert one group of readership (in this case my Twitter followers) into another kind of readership. It’s humbling, the work involved, the sustained amount of work one needs to embark and confront in order to create a true fellowship of people. Fans are beyond marketing and PR. Creating a following is work and takes boatloads of authenticity.

At the same time, the people who showed up last night were fans and I have to acknowledge the oddity of having fans in the first place, all for doing something that is as natural as breathing. That’s what writing is. Or at least my writing. I just have to do it. And to have readers – strangers – be fans of this work is still a weird, weird thing to me. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate everyone who reads my work. Well, I can. I just did.

I’d like to do a Shindig again at some point. When I have something else to read. Something new. I heard from so many people who couldn’t come. Who were too busy, who were in different time zones – some were on the other side of the world. Man, time zones are inconvenient.

As a writer every once in a while you are confronted with how weird the idea of readers who like you is. Because it is. Weird. And beautiful.

Now, I want to know who all the ladies in these graphs are. And, frankly, what the graphs mean. Someone enlighten me.

Speaking of great bullshitters, Mike Monteiro probably has a desk full of medals for the amount of bullshit he has peddled – and sniffed out. Mike is a Twitter friend – we’ve only met once (at a conference in Minneapolis) but I know him well enough to know he’s a very smart guy and, as a web designer, has published a book that is much needed (though the fact that we still need something like this in this day and age says much about the unthinking speed of the entire internet business to date and, hopefully, also says something about The Age of Consolidation that seems to be taking place in the online world) and is perfect for designers, freelancers, anyone who hires them and anyone who runs a company that might need to hire them. No really. This isn’t a how to book for designers. This is a how to book about being a designer.

The best bullshitters are the ones who learn and pass along their knowledge. Now that I have a dog, and am reading about life as a dog (especially this book – just the chapter on smell is worth the price of admission) there’s a poop analogy in there, but let’s leave that out. These two books, completely different in content (and language!) spring from a very similar source. They don’t suffer fools gladly. (And that would go for Dave as well – would it ever!)

The great site brainpickings.org is always good to jog the brain cells (honestly, it’s one of the best sites on the whole internet). Remember these books? The philosophy in Peanuts rendered simple? These books are like perfect pop culture hallucinations, the 60s perfectly rendered. This is kind of what I see the Twister project like – regardless of medium. Oddly retro to counterbalance the nowness of the thing. A revert to print kind of book should look like it’s reverted way back. Because if you go from the web to print (and there’s been so much of this already), your book, the very action, is like entering a way back machine. And that’s kind of cool.