Well, I guess that about wraps it up for 2004. It’s been a heck of a year overall. I’m not going to recap it now – if you want to review it you can go back over the last 310 or so episodes. There are a couple things worth noting, however, looking back and looking forward.
I think over the year the quality of the writing here got better. I look back at some of my earlier favorite entries and they just feel a little sloppy. Sometimes sloppy is good—I’ll have to be careful not to become sterile, and there are certainly still some pretty crappy episodes—but overall readability has improved, I think. You might disagree. I think I was able to produce higher-quality episodes back then, but I didn’t take the time. Or did I? I don’t have anything else to show for those months. It’s all a blur now…
And hey! Check this out! This is a graph generated by Sitemeter that shows my traffic this year:
There’s still a few hours of December left, so it’s easy to imagine hitting 1800 visits this month. The red line is my more conservative estimate of the number of people who visit on purpose. The actual number may be higher; it’s difficult to estimate between all the hits for eggs, alcohol, and sex. The red line is you, the people who actually read this stuff and leave comments and contribute to the community that this has become. The people who leave personal messages for each other in comment threads. As I sit here in a far-off land I still feel connected to you.
Hardest to estimate are the lurkers. I know there are some. Hello, lurkers! Thanks for stopping by! Come back again real soon!
(I was planning to do a fancy interactive thing with a comment for each month as you rolled over that column, but that started sounding an awful lot like work.)
I will not finish The Monster Within by midnight tonight. Part of the reason for that is I’m devoting more energy to smaller bits I can get published and build up a publishing credits list. The other part of the reason is that I’m lazy.
The smaller bits are coming along, though. That may affect the blog as well; some of the creative writing pieces that I had been starting to put up here may go to a different outlet instead. I’ll still put up fragments, but if something is more or less complete I’ll be shipping it elsewhere instead. Moonlight Sonata, which I posted here a while back as “a good start to a short story” now is a short story, and will be appearing soon over at Piker Press. Also, a vastly modified version of the american road myth will be appearing over there. So, obviously, there is still a place for my blog in my creative writing, but it may evolve.
As for New Year’s resolutions, I have but one: Get the pizza crumb out from under the “r” key.
