Happy 5th Birthday Blog!

Image description: cake in the shape of a 5 with five candles
covered with blue frosting and M&Ms

Blog is now five years old!

Five years I birthed this little word baby upon the world. I've learned a lot since then–especially about what not to do. (Ten to twenty page navel gazing posts about prescriptive grammar don't make for particularly good blog entries. Who knew?)  Blog had an unexpectedly awesome January that really ended year four with some razzle dazzle.

Blog wants me to play Big Time (of course) and promise that we're going to hit 4 million page views this year. Not three million...FOUR million.

At least I can for sure do the first part.

State of the Blogion

Since I'm a huge fan of goals (especially well designed, well considered goals) I want to process my goals here at the outset of year five, and I thought for people who wonder how that happens might like to see my process more transparently. Just because I'm making about half my money from writing and have a big audience doesn't mean I don't work on the fundamentals and it definitely doesn't mean I have all my shit together.

[While goals like subscribers and page views are technically not fulfilling the second S of "SMARTS" goals, I find that I can influence them with some predictability when I'm doing all the right things that I can control.]

• My goals from year four were hit and miss. Mostly miss. But I got a few. And I'm edging closer to the point where I can write full time, and pay my bills from it.
• My readership is WAY up from the year before. Even before the sudden explosion of traffic from My Facebook Page, I hit my low end goal of averaging 1200 hits a day. But accounting for that, we blew the doors off the hinges like Angel in the opening sequence. (Did I just make an 18 year old pop-culture reference. Oh yeah.)
• My follower/subscriber growth on everything but Facebook was lethargic. I have about 650 followers across various platforms (or social media where I share nothing but writing updates). That's basically up from 500 and was under the goal of 750 I was hoping for.  My stretch goal was 1000, and I didn't come anywhere close to that amount. 
• I managed to keep blogging, every week day, despite cancer treatments, a ten year relationship ending (or changing, I guess), and moving...twice.
• I wrote almost no fiction that wasn't my work in progress. That's a mixed result since I didn't split my fiction writing into WIP and "other." So technically I hit it, but I'm giving myself Fry eye. 
• I didn't do any writing for the other blogs I usually write for. Bad Chris! No biscuit. 
• I did okay with social media before the election. After I got really stuck for a few months watching the train wreck. It was.....not good.
• I failed hard at writing more reviews of products and awesome lesser-known books.
• I failed at cleaning up a post or tab every week.
• I resumed "Season 2" but did not write an arc significant enough to wrap up at the end of 2016. 

These are my 2017 ("The Year We Fought Back") Goals:

• Currently I'm getting between 5000 and 10,000 pageviews a day. I'm not sure if that's a fluke yet or not, but I'll set a goal assuming that it's not, and give myself a little latitude if things shrink down no matter what I do. I will try to average 5k per day. Stretch goal of 10k per day.
• Cleaning up an old post, menu, or tab at least every week.
• Resuming Season 2 with some sort of plot post at least once a week.
• 900-1000 followers. (Or 250-350 more across all social media) Stretch goal 1500.
• Predictable "meaty" entries twice a week. (Wed and Fri) and the stretch goal of another one on Thursday.
• Personal update (with word count) on Mondays.
• Restart VLOG posts once every two weeks.
• Restart weekly Mailbox posts.
• Writing for Ace of Geeks at least once a month each. Stretch goal of bi-weekly.
• Fiction once a month. (Beyond book writing.) No flex goal. 
• Finish book a mere two months late (Nov 31st.) Flex goal: finish book on time (Sept 31st)
• Re-find those limitations on social media.
• One review each month. Flex goal of one fiction and one craft book each month.

The Flames of Blogust

So we failed to hit Blogust's goals.

We weren't even close.

But before Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me" had even finished its piano/keyboard duet intro and before I had pulled out a tumbler glass to get busy drinking myself into oblivion (which is no easy task when one doesn't drink, despite the phenylethylamine in hot chocolate), Blog strolled in.

"Oh for fucks sake," Blog said. "Are you fucking kidding me?"

"What?" I asked, plugging in my electric kettle.

"You're not even thinking of moping are you?" Blog asked. "Because this post-failure pep talk thing is going to wear thin as a cliche to your audience if you keep using it every time you fail at something. Besides we already had the whole poignant failure moment with the Cool Runnings clip and the Inception music and everything. What was the point of that if you're going to get all maudlin about it anyway?"

"I'm just sort of pissed at how much we missed by," I said. "Over ten thousand."

Blog sighed. "It's like talking to a wall sometimes. If I had a head, I'd be shaking it."

I pursed my lips.

"Okay look," Blog said. "Last four or five months around here have been 32, 33 thousand right?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Kind of disappointing, really. Looked like a plateau," Blog said.

"Right."

"Well in one month you came within spitting distance of 40,000, you wrote some awesome articles, you started a couple of major undertakings. You didn't have a single day under 1000. So you didn't hit your goal. We both knew it was ridiculous. The point is that in trying you kicked ass. Writing is not a hail mary hobby. It's always about working the ball down the field.

"More importantly, you also learned a valuable lesson about the line between quantity and quality and how more isn't always better. Churning out articles didn't make you feel like a creative writer, it made you feel like a content writer. So now you've learned something really important about how you always worry about writing more. Fuggedaboutit. Use that insight to write my entries at a more reasonable pace. Don't worry so much about the day off or the jazz hands days and focus on nailing it when the real articles land."

I nodded. "I guess that's true, huh?"

"You bet your left testicle it is. Now stop being melodramatic and drinking hot chocolate with whipped cream. September is already three days old and I need you at your fighting weight before I start smacking you around to get me a million hits by the new year..."

"Comforting" the Blog

Yesterday, I went to visit Blog; I had put it off long enough.

When Blog first came to me with its insane idea for having an entire month of nothing but 1000+ days, I thought it was out of its mind. Blog is always trying to hit some crazy goal with page views or set some new record that we've never hit before. So the crazy aspirations were nothing new, but this time it was really ambitious and unrealistic.

Yet, against everything I thought I understood about my current levels of traffic, and despite every month prior (that wasn't riding the wave of a viral article), somehow, it just kept happening. We just kept doing it. And some days it was only by 1007 or 1004, but we still made it. And Blog just kept saying that we were going to get a whole month of nothing but 1000+ and that we had never done that before.

I'll admit, by the 20th I had gotten a little swept up in Blog's enthusiasm. I started posting pictures to Facebook of our successes each day. People began to talk about the month of 1000+ as something that had already happened. Blog began to contemplate the next big goal.

But then it happened...

Fifty-two of you out there like seeing Blog cry, don't you?

Since then, I hadn't actually checked in on Blog. The convention was a blur, and I had been pretty busy, but last night I finally had a moment. I stood outside Blog's door and took a deep, deep breath.

I tapped at the door before poking my head in. "Hey buddy, you okay?"

"Yo, C-DAWG! Good of you to stop by!  I'm awe to the sizzum." Blog said. "Come on in! I was just adding up these numbers. Did you know that we will probably go over 35,000 hits this month. That's a non-Creepy Guy record!"

"Wh-  You're okay?" I asked. "You're not in here listening to emo music and reading Emily Dickinson? Didn't you see our numbers on Sunday?"

"Yeah!" Blog said. "They were fan-damn-dizzle-lizzle-astic-tastic, and not made out of plastic.

"What?" I asked, shaking my head. "What does that even mean?"

"Man, half your friends were at conventions this weekend and were trying to save the universe from the orc's paradox bomb, it was a Sunday which is always slow, and there was that huge social media storm about misogyny man, and you couldn't get content to upload because of the hotel's wifi, but we still got 950 hits.

"But... But we didn't make it," I said. "Four ninety eight. We dropped the ball on the 25th day by fifty two people."

Blog's smile didn't even slip. "Twenty-four days in a row without a viral article in play.  BOO YAH! That's a record. That's over ten days longer than our last unbroken chain of 1000+ days. BOO YAH! We used to miss a thousand by hundreds, now we miss it by a few dozen. BOO YAH! And we're about to have our best month since last August when you were still coming down from Creepy Guy. Double BOO to the YA YA SISTERHOOD!!"

"What does that even mean?" I asked.

"How is all of that not absolutely totes awesome–like totally dude-a-cle to the max with spoon gags."

"I just really wanted to hit it. You were so excited.  You got me excited." I said.  "Oh, and don't try to do 80s valley speak; you're not very good at it."

"If there weren't a possibility of failure, it wouldn't be interesting when we succeed. I can't say BOO YAH!!! because the sun came up.  Well, I could, but everyone would find me outrageously insufferable."

"Yeah...we wouldn't want that."

"Exactamundo, Chrisalicious."

I sighed.  "The worst thing is that we could have made it.  If I had posted yesterday's article on Sunday we would have gotten the hits. It's gotten like five hundred views already."

"If you had posted it then, it would have been most heinous. You knew it was coming across too flip and making light of a mass murder. You gotta get that shit right, dude. You needed that time to work on it."

"But I–"

"Chris," Blog said, looking right at me, "if I didn't care about what you post every bit as much as how well it does, we would just post porn, click bait, and articles about home-birthing, Christian-hating atheist, homeopathy-endorsing, feminists who make lists about why everyone else is wrong and post it to Reddit. I mean...that's all Slate does."

"But...you were so excited about the first named month," I said.

"Do you remember when we were happy to get twenty hits a day?"

"Sure."

"Remember the first day we ever hit triple digits?"

I smiled. "Yeah."

"Remember the first day we hit a thousand?"

"Yeah, you were like a puppy."

"Remember when you realized that pretty much you were never going to get below 500 in a day no matter what you did."

"Yeah."

"Every one of those milestones has happened in two years and four months. Imagine where we'll be in another two years and four months."

I licked my lips.

"You know why I'm demanding copious amounts of lip zippage here, brah?" Blog asked. "In just a few days we're going to reach THREE QUARTERS OF A MILLION page views. And a little bit after that, we're going to pass the average pay that a paid writer makes in their writing career. And maybe in June or July or maybe this winter we're going to hit that goal of a month solid of 1000+. And then we're going to hit another goal. And we're just going to keep hitting goals. Because we're growing, and we're getting better, and we're building readership. Because that's what happens when you sit your ass down into the chair every day and do the work. That's how artists get better and find an audience.

"You should have seen yourself, Chris. Two posts a day. Weekend posts. Some of your best work yet. Just keep putting your ass in the chair and doing the work. You make me awesome. There'll be other months."

"Yeah, okay."

"Now do me a favor, okay," Blog said. "You've been working non stop all month. Take a couple of days off, and relax. Eat a Twix. You look like a PSA for the dangers of methamphetamine abuse."

"Not just yet," I said. "Maybe I'll do some light posts these next couple of weekends since I'll be out of town for one and having company the next. For now...I think I'm going to go write."

Blogging From Kublacon!

The most fun you can have without MDMA fueled orgies!

I will be packing up on Friday and heading to Kublacon for a weekend of fun, games, and not being called a fake geek (even though I am one).

However, Blog insists that if I slack on offering new content every single day that there will be no hope of hitting the goal it dreamed up of not dropping below 1000 hits for the entire month of May, and it has insisted that I come up with an itinerary of posts that can be done from the hotel.

"But I like taking the weekend of convention's off," I said. "It's pretty much the closest thing I get to a vacation."

"Oh Chris," Blog said. "Dear, sweet Chris. Do you still not understand who controls whom in this relationship. We're not going to fall below a thousand page views because you wanted a vacation."

"I want the weekend off!" I said. I wanted it to be firm, but my voice cracked a little. "I'll post good reruns! They'll get hits. We'll make a thousand page views. Please don't make me–"

Blog quickly reached over and decapitated our latest picture-finding intern in one casual move.

"Oh I'm sorry, did I break your concentration?" It said. Then it held up the intern's head in its head and started shouting: "Now...if any of you sons of bitches got anything else to say, now's the fucking time."

"It's only me here," I said. I glanced at the intern's headless body.  "....now."

"I didn't want to mess up the Kill Bill quote," Blog said. "I trust you get the gist. Now go make me a postwich"

My relationship to this blog might not be...healthy.

So...for those of you with no plans this weekend, or those of you who just need something to do during the time slot when the shuffler denies you the game you really want to get into, I will be here. Whether I want to be or not.

• On Friday there will be a normal Mailbox even as I attempt to pack, clean every litter box, and try to leave with enough time to get my Friday night geek on. Babies don't make it hard to leave for things on time, do they?
• As I mentioned last Saturday, I did a panel about non-traditional publishing with Ace of Geeks that will be going up as their podcast on their website this Friday. Like most panels and interviews, I thought of addendum when we were on to the next question, or great things to say when the other guy was holding the microphone, or just generally thought of brilliant things to say two hours later (and that's why I'm a writer and not an orator). My Saturday post will be a timeline of additional thoughts (with time stamps) that you can read while listening to the podcast.
• Sun: A long overdue conversation with Ima Lister. I've been putting it off because he's our highest rated guest blogger, but I can't ignore it forever.
• Mon: I have My blog has a crazy ambition to try to do one of my "As a Writer" Convention Reports and to have it up right away. So even if it takes me until late afternoon or early evening, the hope is to get that posted–or at least the first part of one.