1,000 Posts

This is my 1,000th post.

It took me just short of three years to reach this milestone.

I’ve reached a few other milestones too. For instance, as of today I have 9,383 comments in my archives. I’ve been viewed 69,592 times. I have approximately 500 links coming in to me. (Technoroti doesn’t count them all) I have received 12 awards. And I have meet some fascinating people.

I still vividly remember the whole journey.

I wasn’t willing to go into this cold. I get enough rejection without that. So I waited until I had a friend who would hold my hand and a potential audience. That came together for me with Raven and Avon FanLit. Raven told me all about WordPress, Blogger, and LiveJournal. She talked me through getting set up. For the first two weeks, she was the only one to visit me. Seriously. The. Only. One. And she didn’t bother to come by every day, even if I posted every day, which I didn’t do often. If it hadn’t been for her, I wouldn’t have made it out of my first week.

The Avon FanLit contest, which had several thousand participants, was half way over before I got the nerve to put my link in my sig line.

No one came. I told myself it had nothing to do with my total and complete lack of charisma. Hey, people are busy, you know?

So I started putting little teasers in my sig line. Stuff like “Today in the restaurant, Alice says naughty things about the contest coordinators.” A dozen or so people came to visit. I was so excited!!! I wasn’t completely alone anymore. But my new found friends often left their mark on my stats page without bothering to comment. Am I the only one who finds the creepy?

I started paying attention to the sig lines of my fellow contestants and went to comment on anyone who had a blog. I naively thought they would be as eager to hang out with me as I was to find them. Uh… yeah. Not. I was so pathetic I would go and leave comments over and over on the blogs of people who rarely if ever left a comment on mine. I went back repeatedly, looking for replies in their own comments sections. Sometimes they did, but more often they didn’t.

I expanded my blogroll to group blogs by Romance writers. None of them ever bothered to comment. A couple of pro writers visited a time or two, and were great about replying in their comments, but both soon lost interest in me.

What gives? I’m I really so ugly? Don’t answer that.

Again, if it weren’t for a special group of people, this blog would have died. That group came from the contestants at Avon FanLit. The contest ended, but I wasn’t the only one who didn’t want the fun to end. So I set up a Yahoo group and invited everyone to party on. This evolved into the FanLit Forever board. To this day, the ladies from FanLit Forever are a source of security and inspiration to me.

But only three of them are regular commenters here now. When the rest lost interest, it scared me. Who was left to laugh with me? Who could I make cry? Who would re-affirm my existence here?

First I turned to Romance Divas. I found the welcome very vocal, but I could never get much depth there. No one wanted to have heart-to-heart chats with me. Only a couple of people hung out. And only one was ever even marginally interested in my blog. I’m still over there in Thurdays and I lurk a bit other times, and I still think I might be able to carve out a home for myself over there, though I haven’t put the energy into it lately. But the Diva’s lead me to memes.

I’d seen Thursday Thirteen before, but didn’t want to have to blather on so much about myself. I’m just not that interesting. Yeah, yeah, like I’m not blathering about myself now. ah-hem. Back to the point. Some of the Divas were doing Thursday Thirteen. If I did one too and posted with them, then I knew at least a couple of people would comment on mine. YAY!!!!! I did, and half a dozen people commented! Wow!

It took a couple of months for me to get the nerve to post over on the TT hub. When I did, only two or three people commented.

Apparently when it comes to memes, you have to give about 50% more than you will get back out.

By this time I’d gotten a little paranoid. Raven faded out, then stopped blogging entirely. Most of the Avon gang stopped commenting. I got huffy and stopped posting on any blog whose owner couldn’t find the time to post on my blog at least occasionally. Those people really make you feel unwanted, don’t they? I felt like they were cringing every time they saw me coming. So why make the effort? I quit commenting on one writer’s blog because she pushed so hard for compliments on her books, which I made the mistake of reading. I retreated out of the Romance Writer community, and no one noticed.

The original purpose of this blog was to make a mark as a Romance writer. So I started writing Suzie’s House. Why not show what I actually do?

Suzie’s House is scary. Not to read, to write. One of the best things about writing is that you can revise until the cows come home, and no one will ever know. You can scrap something entirely – like a really bad novel – and as long as you don’t mention it to anyone, they won’t know. But Suzie’s House is a performance piece. I often write it right before I post it. I’m talking seconds before it goes live. Often, when I sit down to write, the only think I have going for me is knowing the characters. The rest is flying straight into the mist.

I’m still doing Suzie’s House, and have picked up a reader or two, but it’s no longer Romance. It twisted out from under me and turned into a young adult, because the parts about Ben were the parts people liked best.

Anyway, back to the stats part of my blog. Suzie’s House brings people back over and over who would not otherwise bother with me, as do the history posts on Wednesday which my husband writes. But by this time the main thing driving this blog had become Thursday Thirteen.

I developed an addiction to it. I spent all day flitting around visiting people, enjoying the comments people left, and having myself a grand old time. But half the hits I got in a week were from it and well over half the comments. The rest of my blog started looking unwanted to me.

At this point I had given up on posting on weekends. Dropping the weekend posts didn’t seem to have any effect on my stats, or comments. But I didn’t really take a break then. I was still here, hovering, feeling like a wall flower.

So I dug up another meme. Photohunt posts every Saturday. I did a couple, but it felt wrong to me. I had two serials going – Tudor Follies and Suzie’s House and most of the rest of my blog was writer oriented. A photo of a hamster, or my son’s school project just felt weird. I needed to do something that would fit both PhotoHunt’s requirements, and the way I do things around here.

Thus was Jack and Jill born. I bounced around in a few toy stores looking for dolls to play out my little skits and landed on the “Bendies”, which I found in a head shop. A couple of people liked both the photos and the stories, and that was enough to get me hooked. One of those people no longer blogs and the other has lost interest. Still, I seem to be developing an audience. Yay!!!

Then the unthinkable happened. Thursday Thirteen shut their doors last Christmas. I was kicking myself for doing rounds instead of being all Christmasy with my family when I went to the hub to post my link and saw the announcement. Illness in the family on top of previous neglect of the meme made them decide to quit. Within 48 hours the hub was gone.

My world had ended. Ok, maybe just my sense of security with regards to my blog. Still, it was devastating. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to let go. The T13 crew picked it up and is slowly building it back up to it’s former glory. Thanks, ladies.

I can’t remember if it was before or after that Tamy approached me with a new meme. She isn’t the first to tap me for new memes. There have been several people with start ups I couldn’t manage. But Tamy’s meme fit with what I was already doing like a tailored suit. She wanted to share recipes on Sunday.

I’ve been doing recipes here in the restaurant since the very beginning. I love them because they bring me visitors long after I post them. Remember how my weekends were dead? My recipes didn’t get much action when I posted them. either, no matter what day I posted them, so I moved them to Sunday. I started doing a karaoke thing on Monday and the Talk To Me Tuesday on Tuesday and am very happy with them. No way I would move the recipes back to a week day. With Tamy’s meme, I didn’t have to.

BTW, if you ever want to be a guest blogger here, Monday is your day. Just let me know and I’ll schedule you in. If I don’t have any guests ready on Monday, then I post awards people give me, contests I’m running, tag memes, or stuff people email me then. Considering the kind of email I get, it’s well worth checking out.

So now I’m doing T13, PhotoHunt, Fiction Friday 55. I have at least one post a day, but rarely more than one because I have so little patience with people who post all day long. I have a twitter thing in my sidebar for that. I’m getting at least 70 views a day with an average around to 125. I have several circles of friends. I feel like I’ve covered a lot of ground.

I anticipate a lot more changes ahead. I’m looking to change the look and some of the content and certainly the way content is offered. I’m planning on dealing with my blogroll soon. So hang around. Leave a comment. If the link works, I’ll be by to visit as soon as I can.

Oh, one more landmark. This is the longest post I’ve ever written.