Happy Halloween, everybody.
I hate to do this to you, but as soon as I return, I go away for a time. You see, tomorrow marks the start of National Novel Writing Month 2013. You might recall that I wrote a book last year (which should be published very soon, I promise). Well, tomorrow I start on my second full-length novel, Tithonus. You can track my progress here.
I'm going to be very busy writing in November -- I've set a goal for myself to finish 50,000 words within the first two weeks of the month. That's probably an impossible objective, but I'm going to try, and that means I probably won't have too much time to blog on the side. What a change, right?
I haven't been blogging at all this month because I haven't been inspired to blog about anything. In fact, I think I've been especially introspective...so much so that I've been unwilling to share my thoughts with just about anyone. That's no way to live, so I'm making a conscious effort to be more out there with my feelings in this space.
I've also been kept really busy between work, working out, and getting through a daunting backlog of TV shows. It's all too easy, with all this on my mind, to let the blog go fallow. I hope I can keep you a little more informed, especially as I think my writing process this coming month is going to be much, much better focused than last year's.
Last year, I deliberately avoided any planning of my novel at all, outside the basic premise, before November. This meant I hit the ground running, and wasted a ton of time that could have been used writing trying to figure out what to write. This year, I've got a strong outline prepared in advance, so I know exactly what should happen at every point in my story. I have a feeling this is going to make the whole process go a lot smoother. And, really, I'm more excited about the book. The things I enjoyed the most about my first book were somewhat incidental to the story -- with the second, I'm deeply involved with the story itself. Heck, I've even caught myself thinking about the themes I want to examine in the book, which is pretty exciting.
If you look at the progress, you'll notice I've chosen to categorize this year's novel as Horror/Supernatural. I don't think that's a perfect fit for my plot at all, but I had no idea what else to do. It's set in the near future, but it's not sci-fi. It has elements of spirituality, but it's not a spiritual book. It's pretty thrilling, but it's not a thriller. And so on...no genre explains it sufficiently for me to really feel comfortable applying a label. Since the book definitely has supernatural elements, I went with that, but...it's not quite right.
Being impossible to categorize, however, is something that I have always sought to attain in my own life. I'm pretty happy to be achieving that with my writing, too. Keep a close eye on me! If I don't get 50,000 words by the end of November, then you must shame me mercilessly. Many of you will do that anyway. As for the rest of you, here's your chance.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
retrospection in a calculator
In case you didn't notice, I succeeded in my goal of writing a blog post every day in September. That's thirty posts in those thirty days, and I only had one post that went up after midnight. So I'd like to very heartily pat myself on the back, as well as thank you poor souls who stuck with it.
Mainly I did this to challenge myself to break through my own laziness, but I also thought it'd be interesting to see how it would affect my subjects and readership. Not that I'll be incorporating any of these findings into how I write from now on -- this blog is about what I want to write, right? -- but it'll at least serve as a warning to the rest of you.
If you're interested, you can download the raw statistics of post day/view count/time here.
To begin, here's a chart showing how the month went:
As the chart shows, there seems to be such a thing as oversaturation, It could be that my writing deteriorated, or people just got sick of seeing my links show up on Facebook. Or it could be a coincidence, or there could be some external factors at work. But there's a clear downward trend in views, even though we have that nice spike in the middle.
There were a total of 2,056 views in the past month; this is compared to an overall total of about 7,000 views since I began the blog. For those unfamiliar with the terminology, a "view" is considered every page that a visitor looks at; in this case, each post counts as a page. So there are opportunities for the same page being viewed twice to be counted in these scores, and although Blogger does include an option to not track the author's views, I had not turned it on. I usually load each post at least once, just to be sure it looks good, so consider that.
So that's about 29% of my total views in one month, which sounds pretty good by itself; however, my blog has a total of 64 posts (not counting this one). So that's 29% of views in 47% of the posts, which is...not great. In fact, none of my September posts made it into my top-ten most viewed posts (#1 is my first post about my trip to Germany, which currently stands at 96 views). My #10 most viewed post is my third post about Germany, which has 55 views currently.
My most viewed post from September is at 49 views right now; the least viewed post only has 17, and is, in fact, my lowest-viewed post ever. I guess you guys don't like poetry as much as I thought, and like video games a whole lot.
Interestingly, there seems to be no connection between the likes I received on Facebook for a given post and the number of views I received: the top most viewed received the most likes, but no comments, and the second top most viewed received the most comments, but only one like. This isn't to say that no other posts had comments or likes; several did, but the correlation was low.
I only considered likes, rather than +1s, because Facebook is the traffic source of about half my traffic, which is as much as all other sources put together.
And here's a list of where in the world my traffic is coming from, sorted by number of views in September:
I think I'll do another blog-every-day next September, for maximum control in the experiment. It'll be awesome to compare the statistics next year! Let me know if there's any analysis I missed, or if there's more information you'd like me to gather for analysis! My blog turns six months old in ten days, and it's been a wonderful ride so far.
Mainly I did this to challenge myself to break through my own laziness, but I also thought it'd be interesting to see how it would affect my subjects and readership. Not that I'll be incorporating any of these findings into how I write from now on -- this blog is about what I want to write, right? -- but it'll at least serve as a warning to the rest of you.
If you're interested, you can download the raw statistics of post day/view count/time here.
To begin, here's a chart showing how the month went:
As the chart shows, there seems to be such a thing as oversaturation, It could be that my writing deteriorated, or people just got sick of seeing my links show up on Facebook. Or it could be a coincidence, or there could be some external factors at work. But there's a clear downward trend in views, even though we have that nice spike in the middle.
There were a total of 2,056 views in the past month; this is compared to an overall total of about 7,000 views since I began the blog. For those unfamiliar with the terminology, a "view" is considered every page that a visitor looks at; in this case, each post counts as a page. So there are opportunities for the same page being viewed twice to be counted in these scores, and although Blogger does include an option to not track the author's views, I had not turned it on. I usually load each post at least once, just to be sure it looks good, so consider that.
So that's about 29% of my total views in one month, which sounds pretty good by itself; however, my blog has a total of 64 posts (not counting this one). So that's 29% of views in 47% of the posts, which is...not great. In fact, none of my September posts made it into my top-ten most viewed posts (#1 is my first post about my trip to Germany, which currently stands at 96 views). My #10 most viewed post is my third post about Germany, which has 55 views currently.
My most viewed post from September is at 49 views right now; the least viewed post only has 17, and is, in fact, my lowest-viewed post ever. I guess you guys don't like poetry as much as I thought, and like video games a whole lot.
Interestingly, there seems to be no connection between the likes I received on Facebook for a given post and the number of views I received: the top most viewed received the most likes, but no comments, and the second top most viewed received the most comments, but only one like. This isn't to say that no other posts had comments or likes; several did, but the correlation was low.
I only considered likes, rather than +1s, because Facebook is the traffic source of about half my traffic, which is as much as all other sources put together.
And here's a list of where in the world my traffic is coming from, sorted by number of views in September:
I can guess who my readers are except for France, Serbia, Russia, and Thailand. Who are you guys?
I think I'll do another blog-every-day next September, for maximum control in the experiment. It'll be awesome to compare the statistics next year! Let me know if there's any analysis I missed, or if there's more information you'd like me to gather for analysis! My blog turns six months old in ten days, and it's been a wonderful ride so far.
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