Casting the runes…

A friend of mine dropped me a mail this morning; it read-

‘I probably don't read your blog in the way it's intended, but to me it's like clues in a complex puzzle. I love trying to piece together who you're referring to in this blog, or who this follower is, or what the inspiration was this time...’

Well this time my inspiration is you my friend and you are reading my blog the right way. Beneath the words, hidden in the runes, the real blog lives; and despite the seemingly random nature of the posts, despite the variety I attempt to inject - it only has a couple of themes and both of them are about me. I try to consider my audience, I’m aware that what I write has the opportunity to offend, amuse, puzzle, disgust, annoy, bewilder, confuse, enlighten – but ultimately, although I don’t write this for myself, it is my diary, my memoir, my showcase, my philosophical treatise, my joke book; it IS all about me – the surface text and the sub-text of the runes that lay hidden inside.

Today is my 600^th post. I blog most days (rarely on a Saturday), getting up early, staying up late, jumping out of bed in the middle of the night to jot down an idea – and finding myself still jotting an hour, sometimes two hours later. I’m constantly looking for things to blog about, photograph, doodle, drag from my memory bank. I dread to think what 600 posts means in terms of time, but over the last couple of years I’ve spend at least ten hours per week working on my bloody blog, sixty if you include pure thinking time. Maybe even more than that. Even at just ten hours a week that means that over the short time I’ve been a blogger I’ve spent six weeks of my life on Wonderful Life - and that’s working with a twenty-four hour day calculation so it’s probably closer to two months minimum.

One month a year blogging! Sheesh! Get a life AKH!

I usually write my posts up front in word, sometimes two or three at a time, usually at the weekend. But sometimes like today, I write in real-time (by the way it is (was) ten to six in the morning when I wrote most of this and I haven’t got my friends e-mail yet so I’m time travelling). Sometimes the words come first; other times the words are prompted by an image – a drawing or a photograph. Occasionally they both arrive together, the words popping into my head with an image that I then have to make. Often the posts are prompted by a post comment, an email, a tweet, a FB conversation string, a nightmare.

And I unashamedly advertise my blog. I put it out there on Facebook, on Twitter, in e-mails, even the occasional SMS. I’m not proud, I want it to be read - I want to know what people think about what I’m thinking.

No wonder Gaynor says I’m obsessed. I am.

Over my almost two years and 600 posts I’ve had a lot of comments from my 48 (for a while 49) public followers and all the others who’ve dropped in from time to time or follow anonymously. According to the stats I’ve had 11,628 page reads since the start of June this year, 2,741 last month, 124 yesterday alone.

7, 340 of those reads have come from the UK, 2000 from the US, 177 from Australia, 140 from Canada, 123 from Russia, 92 from South Korea, and the rest from Romania, the Netherlands, Spain, France, and a few other European countries (unlike Alphaville I’m not big in Japan, or India, or China).

I wonder if the Russian reads are KGB. I know who reads me in Romania, France and Australia – but South Korea?

I’m viewed in all sorts of browsers including OneRiot, Opera, Safari; and on various devices - PC’s, Macs, iPhones, Blackberries, quite a few iPads, and even an iPod, although I have no idea how that works.

The post that seems to have generated the most interest is ‘Mecccano’ posted on the 7^th of April this year with 664 page views and 17 comments, and Misty’s Last Post back in August comes in second with 148 page views and a bucketful of my tears.

Maybe I blog too much, Gaynor certainly thinks so, she never reads it, she isn’t in the page view stats. Sometimes, quite often these days, I think about stopping blogging completely, or at least cutting down; doing something else to get this creative vomit out of my system – fling some paint at a canvas, build a giraffe from driftwood, write a novel – spend my month a year on something useful, tangible, something to cling to as I drown, something to be proud of. I’m sure that sometimes the people viewing my pages must think me ridiculous, or pretentious, or just plain weird. I hate it when I don’t get comments, love it when a new follower turns up. I don’t know why I do it. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t do it…

The clock in the lounge just struck six – my friend’s e-mail will arrive in a three hours and fifteen minutes. I’m done.

Another post written; more runes cast. My 600^th post and (who knows) it could well be my last.

I might not even bother to post it.

We’ll see.