I started this website a year ago because I read somewhere that there were upwards of 400 million English blogs in the world and I wondered why I wasn’t one of them. (Actually, that’s not true – it had nothing to do with the number of blogs and I’m sure there are something like 450 million English blogs now and if you do some extrapolation, there must be over a billion in all languages, but I digress…hey, does WordPress have a footnote plug-in?)
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.
