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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Milestones--400,000 and I Can't Thank You Enough

Um....yeah.......listen......
We've switched to metric, so if you could go ahead
and start calling us kilometerstones....that'd be greeeeeaaaaat.
Thanks a bunch lexicon.
The viral post, "Changing the Creepy Guy Narrative," is finally dying down a little from it's viral week.  I didn't wake up to thirty emails this morning (half of them cranky nasty-grams that begged for the sweet finger swipe of "Delete This Comment?" justice).  This morning I woke up to only a single comment--a well worded, thoughtful concern about how my approach may have perpetuated homophobia.  (The comment and my reply are on the Creepy Guy Comment "Overflow Lot" article if you're curious.)  The insanity has ebbed.

There was one commute to work--Tuesday I think--where I was switching between email and Facebook, and by the time I had just read (not responded--just read) one, the other had ten or twenty new notifications.  But now things have died down.  Facebook followers (of me personally or the Writing about Writing Facebook Page), are no longer pouring in.  My inbox isn't pointing and laughing at my impotence to stop it from exploding.  I'm not spending my afternoons futilely trying to reply to so many wonderful, thoughtful comments, but knowing I'll never get to all of them.

Even "died down" has it's own sort of surreal meaning to me now.  Before that article--eight days ago--I every once in a while when I posted a really popular article the night before and then wrote something really popular that day, I would go over 1000 page views. It was a rare treat that happened maybe once every month or two.  (Seriously, I would put it on FB and get lots of congratulations for breaking four figures.)  I would take a victory lap, eat bon-bons for dinner and watch FFM porn while whispering "Soon," to myself.

Right now "died down" means I'm about to edge over 7,000 hits instead of 50,000 (and there's still an hour to go before the cut off).  So everything is a little red shifted, and my sense of scope might be relative for a while.

Traffic analytics from the last two hours in terms of page views per minute.
Man, it's like a fucking GRAVEYARD in here!

It may take me a while to figure out what the new "normal" is.  Really popular articles have a way of going into a "slow burn" mode where their secondary spread can go on for weeks, and even months, and even after that, they become major tributaries to the blog in general.

I also picked up hundreds of new followers (~waves~ Hi everyone!) across Facebook, Blogger, G+ and Feedly.  I know some of them might not stick around once they realize that this isn't a blog about my exploits as a public transit roving crime fighter (Deep whisper: "I'm BARTman"), but is rather just one more snarky blog about writing.

I don't know for certain that I'm ever going to feel excited to break 1000 again. In a way, that kind of makes me sad.  I have a chemist PhD friend who says he's a little sorry to know that seeing an actual electron in an electron microscope will probably be the greatest experience of his career and that nothing else will quite hold a candle to that.  In a way that sort of feels analogous to my current thoughts on being featured in Wil Wheaton's Tumblr.  (And what a class act he was to add the URL back into the story after the place he got it from just cut and past the whole article!)  I wonder if anything is ever going to be as cool as this last week has been.


A part of me (a small part, but definitely significant) is a little sorry that it all happened so fast.  I feel kind of like I just stepped off of Peter Pan's Flight at Disneyland.  "Wait what the hell just happened?  Is it over?  I stood in line; I feel like I deserve to have gotten to ride a ride."  The first day it was so exciting to get 2,000 hits, but then the article really went viral and I started to scream like a little kid who's told that Alien isn't any scarier than The Dark Crystal (I'll never forgive you for that one, Kent).  There's been a lot of screaming this last week each time I looked at my hits.  Fortunately not so many face huggers.

20th Century Fox
With me, you only need one hit, baby.

Of course I want more readers, and I want more traffic--that's the only way the groupie threesomes are ever going to happen (and I totes want those yo).  But in these last seven days, so many milestones have gone flying past so quickly that I didn't even really get a chance to notice some them. I sort of imagined they would be moments I would savor with a Barbaric Yawp.  I didn't even realize I had passed 200,000 all time views until I was at 208,000. Normally I would have posted a post with a screen shot of 200,001 (or something close) and thanked the hell out of everyone for reading. It's like wolfing down your food at a four star restaurant or something.

Then I past 300,000 without noticing.  Just looked up one day and I was already at 330,000.   (And I know this sounds like "Waaah my diamond soled shoes are so fucking tight, lemmie tell ya!")  A part of me feels...well technically it's something called "impostor syndrome."  I feel like I cheated to get here--like I should be back struggling to make 16,000 this month instead of 15,000 last month (and not 246,000....so far).  I feel like the interloper who will be discovered any second now.

However....writing mirrors life well in one regard.  It is nothing anyone is ever "good enough" at.  You can break through plateaus, but there's always more room to grow.  It is something we can continue to improve and never perfect.  So today I looked at this:


...and I decided it was time to begin struggling towards new milestones.  You all have been so wonderful and generous and supportive (even those who left nasty comments because you have burning ulcers in your soul and want to suck the happiness from all creatures of good heart) and I can't thank you enough.  For those who have been here all along, I thank you.  For those who are sticking around, I thank you.  And even for those who just popped by, I thank you.  Now we will look over our shoulder, say "Daaaaaayuuuuuum!" and set new goals.

Everyone knows what a Wheaton is, right?  >:-)

2 comments:

  1. Yes, I came because of your viral post. But DUDE!!!! I'm sticking around because it's a snarky writing blog.

    I write. I write obsessively. (Andi, stop trying to break Dazi's sword arm. Moira, put the damn phaser away... oh, crap. You KNOW she's just going to heal from that. DAZI, DO NOT LOP OFF MOIRA'S HEAD!! Talon, will you get in here and separate these three?) Sigh. They fight over my typing fingers. The voices in my head... Oh, they are plentiful. They don't play well together, though. Fortunately, they're all in different story lines.

    I've read a few other writing blogs that have been interesting. But snark? Oh, snark is like the perfect amount of buttercream frosting on my spice cake cupcake. Am I gonna stick around? Yah, sure, hey you betcha!

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