Just an aside: my little blog here is 15 months old. I’ve never pushed it, never engaged in any of the fakery that ‘serious’ bloggers do to promote their sites. Yet I monitor my stats periodically out of intellectual vanity, because whatever anyone says it’s nice when the peeps read your stuff, and I’ve noticed an alarming trend. All by itself, this indiscretion of mine is growing — slowly, for sure, but steadily.
For example, in the heady months following my blog’s launch in late October 2014 on the heels of my first novel, which briefly peaked at #5 on the Amazon.com.au crime list (and I mean briefly), there was a flurry of attention. 19 posts over two and a bit months reached 229 visitors, most of them visiting me twice! Expecting them to be mostly Australian, I discovered readers from several non-English speaking countries. For some reason, I found that especially satisfying. Olá meus amigos!
In 2015, I posted when and where I could, still preferring to actually write rather than blog about writing. In twelve months I produced a motley assortment of 36 posts, which reached 805 readers. The trend of foreign readers continued, and the list of nationalities became longer and longer. This at a time when my jaded family STOPPED reading my blogs! I’d ask (to test them) what they thought of my latest piece and I’d get one of those, you know, shifty responses that segue suddenly to another topic.
Don’t think I’m not onto you people!
In the five weeks we’ve had of 2016 so far, I’ve posted 10 times and reached 108 people. I am no high priest of mathematics, but on a statistical level this would suggest I’ll find time to post more than a hundred times this year, and find about 2,000 readers. If this happens, I will be gobsmacked. To begin with, I’d have to keep posting at a rate of 10 per month, and I’m telling you now, that’s a statistical improbability right there.
Without spelling it out, you don’t have to be a genius to work out what I do for a living. I am goddamn busy. Also, I have a highly-prescriptive set of internal guidelines which prohibit me from commenting in e-space anything that might cast my occupation in a negative light. So I have no choice but to keep my job and the awful things I deal with every week off my blogging radar.
2016 will be a busy year (they are all busy) but my belated New Year’s resolutions are pretty simple — finish at least one of the two novels I am writing. This should be a gimme, because I am in first edit of one. The other is still about 850,000 words short! I want to try publishing it the old-fashioned way, because e-books are not where I imagined myself to be. I also want to try more genres, and get away from the crime-thriller-horror-fantasy I fell into from the beginning. I definitely have no shortage of ideas! Time, as ever, is the key. I don’t want to steal any away from my wife, but everything else can suffer. My saving grace is that I don’t give a shit if I’m never nominated for the Man Booker Prize, and I won’t curl into the foetal position whimpering if they never pay me a million bucks for the film rights.
These are my wonder years, and this blog is part (but only a part), of it. To my readers, I hope you can stay tuned in 2016, and now that you’ve known me for a while, please drop me a comment whenever you like. Us introverts can never have too many friends!
— actually, that’s probably exactly what we could have too many of … !