Tomorrow's Halloween, but I'm not scared. I've got big, exciting plans. My feet will move lightly, my face will dazzle with expression, and I will remind the world what joy can be. Somehow, as if I knew.
The scary thing comes after Halloween -- that's National Novel Writing Month -- which, you may remember, I indulged in (and succeeded) the previous two years. I intend to one-up myself this year by competing twice; once with a team-written book (in concert with the incomparable Josh), and again with a book written solo. Never fear; the team-book shall be a total of 100,000 words between us, so as not to violate the spirit of the challenge.
So all of this writing means that I'll be mostly hermetical throughout the month of November. I have this vague sense of dismay that I still feel the need to rest my pen during October, but four months of consecutive intensive writing challenges would really be a little too much for me right now.
However, I do vastly prefer the writing process for novels over shorter-form works. Something about having the freedom to wallow in my own creative juices, rather than feeling the need to disseminate my works as soon as they're finished, appeals to me immensely. So maybe I should just be writing short story collections or something, I don't know.
After finishing my blogging challenge last year, I threw together a pretty minimal statistical analysis of the receptions my blog posts had received. I didn't reach any deep conclusions, but it was fun to try to figure out if there were any results to be found in the number of Facebook likes and comments each post received. I was hoping to do something similar this year, but I don't even know where to begin putting it all together. As for comments, there are too few to make it worthwhile; and though there are a few likes to be found here and there, I've grown skeptical of those as a meaningful metric.
Pageviews tell a different tale, though. For whatever reason, September featured a few of my most-viewed posts ever, including the top spot. My post about Lovecraft, for instance, garnered over 100 views, narrowly edging out my first post about my trip to Germany last year for the top spot. Yet it received zero likes and zero comments on Facebook. It was quite a bit more popular on Google+, where I think the title gave it a wider audience than it might have otherwise received. But as for people who actually know me, it seems to have been a dud.
The third-place spot in pageviews was attained by my third post of the month, spirit shanty, all about Moby Dick. But then, this one had some extracurricular help, too, in that I posted it for my class to read. It was a relatively small class and that doesn't fully explain the boost, but still -- I only got one like, and no comments on Facebook (although it did earn a comment in the blog itself). Whence the views?
Spot number eight was overtaken by the tyranny of stuff, although that one could have been attributed to me reading it so much, because I was so pleased with it. No likes, no comments, nothing at all; perhaps you knew not what to make of it. But I did, so that was fine.
So, of those top ten spots, three belong to blog posts from this past September -- and none at all from the September before. Perhaps there can be progress after all. But for now, I will be quiet. You will hear from me again in December, either in triumph or in glorious, grinning failure. Either way, I'll learn.
