Some time in the last week, Tales from FAR Manor reached the 40,000 pageview mark. Actually, it reached that mark a while ago — stats only go back to May 2009 and the blog has been around for four years longer than that. I figure a lot of that traffic is spambots, judging from what lands in the moderation and spam filters.
Oh, speaking of pageviews: Three Sprites, One Silent has edged past Geek vs. Zombies as my most-viewed #FridayFlash story — the current count is 204 to 203 right now.
My Monday post about iBooks Author has done pretty well. It’s likely one of the most retweeted essays I’ve posted to date. If I wasn’t writing so much fiction, I’d try to turn out more essays like these. But there’s only 24 hours in a day, and I usually get less than one of them to spend writing.
So… maybe I’m not-so-famous now, but you never know, right? I’m sure if my stories get any serious traction, I’ll have people asking me things like “where do you get your ideas?” The answer is the question — or to make it easier to parse, the answer is “the question.” That’s how I handled the “one prompt, three genres” challenge: I looked at the picture and asked three questions:
- what’s a stump doing in the water? (Three Sprites, One Silent)
- what’s in that hollow? (Feast)
- what was on that tree before it was cut and flooded? (Initials)
White Pickups was originally a piece of flash fiction. I asked, “what happens next?” and 150,000 words later… More recently, I got feedback from Craig W.F. Smith’s beta read on Chasing a Rainbow. One of his comments was, “opens it up for sequels.” I thought to myself, “what would happen next?” and I got the answer in a Download From God. I figure while I’m waiting to get unstuck on Pickups and Pestilence, I’ll see where this goes. I don’t have even a working title for it, but do think it’ll run about 12,000 words.
[UPDATE] Now that it’s Thursday, I can share some new news. I’ve joined the TuesdaySerial staff! There’s an interview with yours truly at the link. If you’re writing (or podcasting) serial fiction, be sure to leave a link in the collector on Tuesdays, midnight to midnight (Eastern US time).
IMHO, "what happens next" is at every writer's core being. We live with this phrase resonating in our very being. Sometimes, we even write about it. :)
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