End of August Report Huge Changes.

Well, turns out August was quite the month.  We went from 1,369 as a bellwether month to 11,473.  Over six thousand of those hits came in on 20 Ways to Sabotage yourself as a Writer, which will totally be the greatest hit for this month along with Morning Writing (The Lessons of Brande)--an older article that found new popularity on Stumbleupon.

Ah Stumbleupon.

I can't stress enough how helpful it has been for people to give me a "Thumb Up" there.  All these crazy ass numbers come from S.U.  Even after the runaway effect of 20 Ways calmed down, and the weekend of madness plateaued, I still get perhaps 75% of my traffic from the articles that have gotten popular on S.U.  So any old articles given a click there will potentially give me a lot of benefit.

W.A.W. is making a tiny trickle of predictable income.  It used to be one cent every few days and maybe once or twice a month, someone would click an ad.  Now I'm making $.03 to $.06 cents per day.   It's still absolutely peanuts, but it gives me this tiny little pinprick of hope--much like the little flag sticking out of the tiny hole half a mile away gives golfer's hope.

This does mean I've got to play things a little less fast and loose with picking images.  The last thing I want is starting to wade through thirty pages of Cease and Desist orders from man eating lawyers.

Big plans for September:  More on the Skyrim report.  More fiction (including a piece on Burning Man if I can figure out how to disable ads for a single page and how fast I can revise).  My usual host of guest bloggers. Turning all those "best speculative fiction" books into a poll (Friday?).  And a sincere attempt to get more of the glossary done.

Remember I'm still looking for guest bloggers.  I can guarantee an audience of about 200 for your post, and if it takes off on Stumbleupon, the sky is the limit.  (My most popular article is at 6100.)

Of course if you want to help out a struggling writer try to make a go of it, there are lots of ways I talk about in my Disclaimers/FAQ and some don't even involve money.

Thanks for reading!

What?  Oh the Pretentitron?  I suppose for the four of you who have been following the events of the last few days might be wondering about the Pretentitron.  Well, Cedrick warned me what they were after, so I gave a call to the Men in Black who stopped by here a while ago, and we rigged up a little surprise that looked just like a Pretentitron.  I'm sure they took it to their guys-that-can-phase-shift training facility to get right to work cloning them.

~THUD~

In fact, that noise you just heard should be the sound of a 100 Megaton warhead detonating in a slightly off phase dimension.  Don't be surprised if seismologists think it came from Sidorukun, Indonesia.  It's one of the closest dimensional weak spots to the opposite side of the Earth from Writing About Writing's headquarters.

The real Pretentitron was in my garage over the weekend--since I had all that space from Burning Man junk being gone.  We'll try not to get too much playa dust on it before we bring it back.