Blogwanking , because I need to

Okay, so I’m within two views of my all time high number. Don’t get excited, my number is 77 in one day. I know blogs that get 77 views per hour.

I blame this on my morning post, Jack ‘O Lantern. It’s a fun bit of short fiction that was very well received.

I’m making this post just to get my numbers over the top. Please feel free to reblog Jack ‘O Lantern to all your followers. Help me set a new personal best. I need two views to tie, and three to win.

I owe some Thanks to my Friends

Entertaining Stories gained new followers at an accelerated rate recently. It couldn’t have happened without the help of a few special blog friends. These people went out of their way to help me and today I’m saying thank you.

If you’re one if the new followers, thank you. Here’s a post I put up recently to help you keep up with my shtick. The Entertaining Stories Primer.

S. K. Nicholls has been a great help. She did a wonderful little push for my book Panama. She also took The raven of Doubt off my hands for a few days, at a time when I really needed to operate doubt free. I gained several followers from this push and would appreciate the rest of you visiting her blog and checking it out. She writes wonderful stories about nudist colonies and such, base upon real experience. You know you want to read that.

D. S. Nelson invited me to participate in her Friday tasseomancy project. My tea leaf reading was a popular project with my readers, and I gained followers here too. She has a new reading up today, and you should check it out. She’s also expecting, and I wish her all the best.

Rachel Carrera did an author interview with me. Of course I broke all the rules and answered her questions in narrative style without including the questions. She must have forgiven me, because she also did a push for Panama. She wrote about the haunted places she has lived in recently. The bit about the crunchy worms on the floor was fascinating.

Karen invited me to participate in her ten statements project. This is a sequence for writers to explain some things about themselves to a larger audience. I reached a larger audience, and my little blog grew. She also invited me on the writing process blog tour and my corner of cyberspace grew some more. Please visit her at My Train of Thoughts On and In a Small Compass.

Blog friends are wonderful friends. These people have been very kind to me. I hope my readers will help express my gratitude by visiting these awesome bloggers and writers. They didn’t have to do any of this, and they have their own novels to promote. If you came here because of one of these bloggers, the others might be interesting to you.

Blogging, writing, and rambling

This is going to be one of those rambling posts. I learned about a writing exercise called “free writing”. This is where you just write, without any outline, specific plot, or preconceived outcome.

Apparently, I’ve been doing it with my blog. Whenever I write about my Muse, or my characters, I’ve been free writing. This isn’t to say that I don’t check my spelling or give it a quick proofread. I want everyone to enjoy it. I’m just not doing a deep edit and spending hours making it just so. I even found an ly adverb in an old post.

This isn’t the same effort I put into my fiction. I’ve been working over some of those stories for years. I learn something new, then give an old story another read. They ought to be pretty decent when I finally get them online.

I’m reading an older book that was quite popular. (No names) The author made a lot of mistakes. It gets hard to tell who’s speaking in several places, and I’m having a hard time visualizing what he wants me to see. The formatting is awful. I won’t blame him, since he died before ebooks existed. There are places where two or three words don’t have spaces between them. Words like ‘in’ became ‘m’, and ‘f’ was translated to ‘t”.

I pray for the skill to format my manuscript such that I don’t irritate readers. I also want to make sure readers can see what I need them to, without being annoyingly descriptive. (Look an ly descriptor)

I was told (ordered) to read Stephen King’s On Writing. I was really struck when he said writers need a special place, a far seeing place to just ruminate and receive new ideas. I’ve been telling you about my imaginary writing cabin in some of my old posts. I guess I’m getting some of it right.

No one wagered a guess at last month’s background image. It was a group of trees covered in mistletoe. I changed my background to one of ice for January. No need to guess, in my mind January means ice.

I am starting to see a lot of re-blogs in my Reader. There are a couple people that re-blog a dozen or more posts per day. This probably goes back to my fear of blowing up your timelines. I promise not to re-blog something unless I think it’s particularly interesting. One of them re-blogs exclusively, there is never any original content. I promise to provide original content. I figure you can surf around for interesting stuff as well as I can.

I had a secret dream to get 100 followers by 2014. I wound up with 92. Since I’ve only been blogging since September, I’m actually very happy with this number. Hello and welcome to the visitors I had from Germany and St. Vincent. I’m embarrased to say I had to Google St. Vincent. It looks like a cool place. I love seeing my map expand showing the international visitors.

I have plenty of work to do in 2014. I need to make changes based upon my critique group, then take up the more serious tasks I got from the editor. I want to read more, which is easy enough. I also want to keep working on my new story. My word count is in the toilet now, but I’ll get back on track. I also need to take the editing lessons and apply them to my old work. Somehow, I’m going to get them up on Amazon this year. Then there’s the need of my real job, you know, the one with a paycheck.

I don’t do New Years resolutions. I can attempt a change any time I want. I like to have a kind of task list though. I suppose this post was a step in that direction. Happy New Year.