Tag: blogging

Accidentally Inspired Best of 2016

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The blog had a few hits over 10,000 this year, and even factoring in (or, rather, out) the unprecedented and unexplained 2500 or so hits from Taiwan late last month, that’s over 2000 more hits than last year. And considering that this blog gets promoted … not at all, but only through repeat visitation and people stumbling across it, I’ll take that as a pretty good sign. (Also — thanks for reading!)

Since it’s growing, and since I have at least a few regular readers and commentors, I thought I’d try something different. I’ve not done this before, but all the cool kids are doing it, and it got me thinking: as much as I spin my wheels around here, I have written a few things that aren’t a total waste of time here at Accidentally Inspired. I mean, granted, 2016 has turned into a total sharknado-show here in the closing months, but it hasn’t all been bad. So what better time than the end of an arbitrarily-defined irregular orbital period to take a look back at some of those posts?

Here, then, are the best of 2016.

Most Popular Overall: These are, in descending order, the most-viewed posts on the site.

  1. Do You Wanna Go To Target? I guess it should be no surprise that the goofiest thing I wrote this year would be the most-read post I’ve ever had here. Lesson learned: start a youtube channel.
  2. Why Mickey Mouse is the Worst Kids’ Show. Kids go through phases, and my kids were in a doozy of a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse phase. It was lodged in my mind like popcorn between the teeth for months, and this was the result. I stand by every word of it, months later.
  3. Orkestra Obsolete. I did something here that I rarely do, which was to re-post a video that I saw and thought was awesome with very little commentary. Somehow, searches for that band ended up directing some visitors here, and still do occasionally. Still a great video.
  4. Why I Am an Atheist. I decided this year I wasn’t going to pretend I wasn’t an atheist any more. I’m too old for that sharknado. This was my coming-out post. Not a bad read if you’re interested in the guy behind the curtain.
  5. More Riffing on Light and Dark. Just a little post about symbolism that I may revisit some time, because it’s everywhere, but we don’t pay all that much attention to it. I think I was high on the scene where (SPOILER!) Han Solo dies in TFA at the time.

Most Popular Flash Fiction: I haven’t written as much flash as I used to (and I need to work on that — it really is great exercise), but I still do from time to time. These stories had the most views out of the lot.

  1. Pegasus Intelligence. A funny bit of fluff about a stymied writer. Funny how that’s a motif across my work.
  2. A Laughing Matter, Ashore, and The Dark Fairy. Three stories in a collaborative flash fiction challenge. Links to the other authors’ contributions are contained within each of those pages. The germ for the first story (A Laughing Matter) came from my Storymatic, which has proven to be a pretty awesome little tool.
  3. The Apocalypse Ticket. A lesser-known superhero races to save the world but is bested by bureaucracy. I think it’s no coincidence that I’m at my best when I’m adventuring in the absurd.
  4. Overtaken. A weird little piece I wrote in the wake of the Olympic games, but not a bad one.
  5. The Cloud Conspiracy. A genre mash-up that I actually quite enjoyed: climate science fiction and noir.

Honorable Mentions / My Favorites (in no particular order): A handful of pieces I particularly enjoyed for one reason or another.

  • The Prisoner’s Dilemma, Egomaniacs, and the 2016 Election. This one very nearly cracked the top 5. I imagine all pre-election pontification looks pretty silly in retrospect, but I was proud of this piece. I particularly liked the precept of using logical problems and thought experiments to structure some entries, which is a thing I may return to.
  • An Open Letter to the Creators of FreeWrite. The FreeWrite is a product I have decided to love to hate. I absolutely adore the idea, but it’s so self-important and overhyped, it’s almost ludicrous. It still pops up in my facebook all the time, and while I would love to own one, there is no way in hell I’m swallowing the $499 (!) price tag.
  • Chick Magnet. I absolutely loved this bizarre little story about a guy who, despite his wishes, is loved and pursued by a flock (haw) of avian suitors.
  • I Hate Everything, Even My Own Birthday. Because it’s true.
  • On Losing, or Why Art Competitions Suck. A little treatise (read: rant) on why it’s bottom-line absurd to compare your art to anybody else’s.
  • No Such Thing as Coincidence. Not a revelatory post or anything, but a little spotlight on what I would consider some tremendous personal growth: earlier in my life, a setback like the one I suffered would almost certainly have had me throwing in the towel for good. But not this one, not me, not now.
  • Star Wars Owes You Nothing. Despite overwhelming positive reception, the haters were out in force over Star Wars VII, and I think that’s idiotic because, well, Star Wars (or any other beloved bit of media) owes you nothing.

Bonus: My Favorite Search Terms for 2016: Unfortunately, Google apparently hides the searches that bring people to the site, and Google is obviously the overwhelming king-daddy of search engines, so that’s a pretty big missing puzzle piece. Still, I get to see some of the terms, and some of them brighten my day.

  • “giving my son an enema” led a few visitors to what is still one of the most-viewed pages of all time on the site, and I have mixed feelings about that. Pity that I don’t actually tell the story. It’s too unpleasant.
  • “sw7 sucks”. Blasphemy! My review is most definitively in support of TFA. Also, as noted above, Star Wars owes you nothing.
  • “are dreams useless?” and “dreams are useless”. Yes, they are.
  • “the meaning of the word babyloading”. I don’t know what this word means, but it does, in fairness, seem like exactly the sort of thing I’d talk about.
  • “‘hadn’t pooped in five days’ diaper”. Again, you’ve come to the right place.
  • “what do you mean by locker room talk”. Oh, you know. Just a desperate attempt to legitimize a serial abuser of women.
  • “bouts of gratuitous whining”. I think I have a new subtitle for the blarg.

I guess that pretty much does it for 2016. So as Han Solo said to a guy who was really just trying to help him out: I’LL SEE YOU IN HELL.

And as we go into 2017, remember our daily affirmation:

Image result for donnie yen i am one with the force

(Thanks imgur.)

2016 in Review

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*peeks out of his apocalypse-proof bunker*

*looks both ways for passing trains, heart attacks, or plagues*

So, uh, 2016, huh? Been a bit of a treacherous road, hannit? I mean, we say that at the end of every year, and certainly every year has its share of ups and downs, celebrity deaths, breakthroughs and disappointments. But it’s hard to deny that 2016 feels different, especially owing to the recent spate of deaths.

Image may contain: 9 people, people smiling, text

Not least among them of course is Carrie Fisher, whose passing hit me harder than any this year. Probably because I’ve been a Star Wars kid for the entirety of my functional memory (all I can really remember before I was 14 or so is locking myself in a locker at the high school while my dad — a teacher at the time — was playing basketball, shooting the light bulb in my bedroom with a squirt gun until the bulb exploded [it didn’t take long at all], and watching Star Wars and Back to the Future about a hundred times).

Then there’s Trump getting elected, which fills me with more despair than I care to even think about, so I’m just going to bury my head in the sand and forget I even mentioned it today, lest I fall down another diatribe rabbit hole around here, and NONE OF US WANTS THAT.

Point is, the last few months especially have been rough, so it only makes sense for the rest of us to keep our heads down until 2016 has run its course.

Of course, the end of the year isn’t just for turtling up inside our shells, it’s a time to reflect on what we’ve accomplished, and I’m happy to say that 2016 was a decent year for me personally. I overcame my nerves and self-doubt and finally got my first novel submitted and out in the world. (No leads yet, but that’s okay.) I lost my mind and ran my first obstacle course race, which was awesome and I’m already registered to repeat in April (thanks to my wife, who is ever-indulgent of such dalliances). I started my new job, which, while a little more taxing than my old job — and more demanding of my time outside standard working hours — is also a lot more creatively fulfilling.

Running-wise, I haven’t looked at my metrics in a while, but the nice part about running with gadgetry is that I don’t have to think all that much about how much I’m running — the technology tracks it all for me. Apparently, I’ve run 596 miles this year, up from 460 last year. I’m pleased with that — the number could be higher, but I was lucky enough to spend most of this year not dealing with injuries. Most of those miles have been comfortable and pain-free, so to get almost 600 there is encouraging.

Writing-wise, I finished up the first draft of novel #2, completed a third edit on novel #1 (and finally started submitting it) and have completed about 60,000 words of novel #3. That’s somewhere in the range of 8,000-10,000 words a month, minus a month’s worth for those edits; call it 90,000 words. For a guy like me with a full-time job and two full-time kids … well, I was going to say that’s respectable, but seeing as that’s a sliding scale, I’ll content myself with saying it makes me happy, at least.

Then there’s the blarg, here. I’ve not been quite as prolific as in years past, but I still get about three posts a week, for anywhere from 500-1100 words on average, with the odd outlier (*COUGH* Force Awakens Review) pushing 2000. Wordpress tells me I have 172 posts this year, and if the average is, let’s be conservative and say, 600? That gives … damn. 103,200 words. On the one hand I feel bad about that; it seems to recommend that I’m more productive here than in my capital “W” Writing, and I can’t say I’m pleased about that. Then again, a thing I read over and over is that all writing is good writing — it all sharpens the iron, as it were — so in that case, any productivity is good productivity.

All that is to say that I’ve produced something like 200,000 written words this year, run about six hundred miles, and taken some real, concrete steps to actually getting my writing out there in the world. None of which is a small thing; altogether, it’s pretty damn encouraging. Furthermore, if a guy like me can do it, then literally anybody can do it, and given that resolution season is upon us, what more motivation do you need?

Next up: a review of some of the year’s top posts.

Something Something Taiwanese Dog Posts

Pavowski4 Comments

So … I got 900 hits on the blarg today. Which kinda made my jaw hit the floor — a good day around here gets me maybe thirty or so views. Nine hundred? Them’s like, real author numbers, with real fanbase followings.

But it turns out that about 800 of those came from Taiwan? And mostly within a 2-3 hour window around the middle of the day? So I guess either somebody’s cat kept swatting at the refresh button, or maybe, just maybe, posts from a dog’s point of view are just, you know, the roadkill that your dog just can’t wait to wallow in to the Taiwanese? I’m talking in questions because this is just totally confusing?

Stranger still, apparently the hits were referred from Facebook. Which is weird, because I don’t link my own posts on Facebook but once in a blue moon. Which almost has to mean that somebody else linked me on Facebook. Somebody, presumably, in Taiwan. With a pretty large following. Or a click-happy cat.

I dunno. If anybody can explain this to me, it would, you know, satisfy my seriously piqued curiosity.

Our Voices Reach Far

Pavowski4 Comments

The focus of this blarg has never been to rack up huge numbers of readers or views. Those things are nice — it’s nifty to watch the spinning wheels of the virtual odometer on the wall click over and reach new heights — but, even almost two years after I laid down the first lexile brick here on my corner of the net, the purpose is the same as it was: to think and write about the process of my “real” writing, and to serve as a release valve to vent my spleen from time to time.

Still, it’s neat to see those numbers grow. And while it would be hard to call my readership a horde, there’s an uptick that’s measurable. 1000 more views from my first year to my second. I’ve already had as many unique visitors this year as in last year, with three months to go. Which means that my little imprint here is growing, that more people are reading what I’m shouting into what I so often think of as the void.

measured-sandwich
I went to pixabay.com for an image of an odometer and found this picture instead. You’re welcome.

 

And that inevitably causes me to wonder how people end up at my site, and for those that end up clicking around a little bit, what makes them stay. Usually I have no idea. WordPress reveals my “trends” and my most popular posts to me, but there’s little rhyme or reason there. This year, the top of the pops has been my “Do You Wanna Go To Target” bit of fluff, composed after listening to the Frozen soundtrack for roughly the three-thousandth time when my wife and I were making a day run to Target. Then there’s a little muser of a piece I popped off about the symbolism and the ubiquity of light and dark in literature, which gets a handful of hits every week. And then, it’s been a constant head-scratcher ever since I penned it, but the story I didn’t write about giving my son an enema never seems to leave the top five.

Still, trends seem to balance out and I have a more-or-less regular crew of readers, I think. Unless I go crazy and write four or five posts a week, I usually get about ten reads a day. And while that’s not shattering any internet records or anything — I mean, if I wanted views and clicks, I’d go spout profanity about Donald Trump while wearing a fire helmet and slathering myself in chocolate sauce on youtube or something — it’s an extra little kick in the pants to keep me writing, knowing that there are people out in the cyberverse picking up what I’m putting down.

But then there are the outlier days, like this wekend, that strike like lightning and with about as much explanation. Saturday, my website was accessed from eleven countries. Eleven! Imagine, the drivel I penned while sitting on my couch with my lazy golden retriever sitting next to me and my kids strewing Legos across the living room floor (setting traps for my tender feet), somehow made it, literally, to the far corners of the globe. Wild. And then, Sunday, my website had over 100 views. A hundred! That’s never happened, and I have no idea why it happened. I can hope that some doppelganger, some kindred spirit, read some old post of mine and spent hours plumbing the depths of my site, nodding his (or her!) head in silent, shocked agreement and wonder. Equally possible, I guess, is that it was a gaggle of readers whose cats fell asleep on their keyboards and kept hitting the refresh key.

Who can figure these things out? Determining what will resonate with readers is about as easy as reading your future in the entrails of the hobo you killed and buried in the crawl space. Which is to say, tricky at the very least.

As usual, the only thing to do is keep writing.

Thanks for reading.

Or, maybe, thanks to your cat for falling asleep on the keys.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Cold Storage

Pavowski4 Comments

 

When we talk about writing, we’re usually focused on the glitzy stuff. LOL JUST KIDDING, as if there’s anything glitzy about sitting in our darkened rooms, pounding feverishly on our keyboards until we collapse from exhaustion and despair.) That act of raw creation is what non-writers think about, it’s what burgeoning writers focus on, it’s indelibly the picture of what a writer does. Rightly so.

If only I could look like such a boss when I write.
If only I could look like such a boss when I write.

Sitting down to write the draft, spilling the words forth onto the page is what it’s all about. Whether it’s the unstoppable flood of a river smashing through its dam or the pained trickle of a man with a swollen prostate, the writing is what matters. Word count. Finished chapters. The flutter of ink-stained pages landing on the pile.

But it’s not the whole picture, not by far.

The first draft, magical though it may feel, results in something you wouldn’t want to bring home to meet your parents. Like a Frankenstein’s monster made of mismatched limbs or a garage-built car constructed from nothing but spare parts, the first draft is imperfect, incomplete.

What the monster needs, though, is not to get fixed right away. What the monster needs is some time in cold storage.

My wife makes a hell of a cheesecake. The process is simple: whip all the ingredients together, smash them into a mold, bake at 350. But it’s not done after it bakes, not nearly. It comes out of the oven and goes straight into the fridge to draw all the heat out of it, to actively stop that act of creation that causes all its components to chemically react. Only then — only after it’s lost all the heat of its making and had a chance for its parts to settle, compact and congeal — is it ready for the finishing touches, its layer of cream frosting, its drizzling of cherry syrup.

The time not cooking, in other words, is just as important to the finished product as the cooking itself.

So it is with writing.

You pour the raw ingredients of character and conflict into the mixing bowl and beat furiously for the first draft, then toss it into the oven of creation for a while for those conflicts to bake, boil, and bubble over. You drain yourself as a writer and channel all that energy of creation into the making of this thing. And then you throw it in the freezer.

Take it off the fire of creation. Remove the heat of your emotions for all its little parts. Give it some time alone to settle, and more importantly, give yourself time to cool off. Put those emotions about the story into storage and do your best to forget about the damn thing for a while. Only then can you come back to the story level-headed and clear-sighted enough to put the proper finishing touches on.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think we’ve still got a bit of leftover cheesecake in the fridge.

This post is part of SoCS. Head to LindaGHill‘s blog to check it out and get involved. And, yeah, I’m still taking something of a break from my standard re-motivational weekend rambles; it feels odd to write about writing when I’m not actually writing much. Regularly scheduled programming will return someday.