One Year of Blogging

I’ve spent some time trying to come up with something to say in this post other than “Been blogging for a year!” and failing rather miserably.

So I guess I could recap some numbers.

This will be my 62nd blog post.

22 of the posts are book reviews.

17 of the posts are original stories/poems/works of some sort.

17 are unneeded opinions that I felt like disclosing to the world.

5 are unlabeled ramblings. Well, 6, if you count this one.

My most popular post is my review of Fifty Shades of Grey. People will always come for  the porn, apparently.

Speaking of porn, 7 searches of the term “severus snape porn” or some variant thereof have led to hits on this blog. Some of my favorite search terms to date include:
“why is my love candle flickering”
“shakespeare i’m writing the bitch a sonnet”
“arguing with a Catholic” (amusing since I am Catholic but don’t recall mentioning it specifically on this blog. Till now)
“i hate that sex exists”
“how long has Caius Pompeius been buried there?”
“i had a dream that i saw myself looking at the window with sunlight coming through?”

There are also a lot of variants on whether or not the relationship in Fifty Shades of Grey is abusive (IT IS) and the poor quality of the writing of The Hunger Games (I’m on the side of the search term “suzanne collins good storyteller bad writer”).

I have over 6,500 hits. This is hardly a mindblowing number, but it’s way more than I ever expected, given how infrequently I post and how sporadically I comment on other blogs.

I’ve written 56,379 words for this blog (not counting the “About” page). The average number of words per post is 924. Perhaps I should be editing more thoroughly than I do.

Overall I think what I’ve gained from this blog, apart from the obvious blessing of getting to know so many amazing people who participate, is how much fun it is to use writing as a mechanism for thinking. Having this blog has helped me better express my thoughts and articulate my opinions. It’s helped me think critically about the things I enjoy and lets me experiment with writing- while occasionally given me ideas. For instance I have a few ideas for regular features on this blog, though it remains to be seen how much time I have to implement them. And it’s given me some ideas for my fiction- ideas that hopefully won’t take me too long to put in effect.

It’s also introduced me to the horror that is statistics addiction- endlessly refreshing the stats to see new followers and hits. Oh, well. I guess there had to be a downside somewhere.

Thank you all so much for reading and following! You have no idea how much it means to me and how much for fun it makes this experience.
Oh, and if any of you can spot the change in blog, you get a prize of… well, I’ll get back to that. Suffice to say it involves something from a book, about books.