Nicola Vincent-Abnett

Nicola Vincent-Abnett
"Savant" for Solaris, Wild's End, Further Associates of Sherlock Holms, more Wild's End

Friday 11 May 2012

My Centenary!


So... I have reached my hundredth blog!

When I set out to write a blog a day, I think I forgot how time flies. It doesn’t take long to write a blog; it’s twenty minutes a day that gets me started and wakes me up, and, having begun, I hardly see how I’m ever going to stop.
With other forms of writing, there is generally an end in sight, even if it takes... oh I don’t know... a year or so to write a novel. There are, of course, writers who specialise in the improbability of finishing some great opus that, once begun, weaves a relentless path into the hundreds or even thousands of pages, but, it’s generally possible to see the end of a project.
I look at bloggers and realise that some of them are already six or seven, or even ten years into a their blogging careers, and I am frankly aghast at their stamina.
My hundred blogs represent about fifty thousand words, and have probably taken about thirty-five hours to write, which is odd, because, can you imagine writing half a novel in a normal working week? Nope. Thought not.
I have snarked less than I have simply recorded my thoughts, but my snarkiest posts have been among my most popular.
And, in the number 1. spot... you guessed it: Stop Whining and Write a Better Book
My little bits of fiction seem to go down rather well, too, and you particularly like my extended jokes.
Most of my readers come from the UK, and then America, but in third place is France, which explains why, ‘snarky’ is so often auto-corrected to Sarkozy!
I’m not sure what the etiquette is for revealing reader figures, especially since I have nothing to compare those figures to. I have no idea how many readers I could expect to have after a hundred days, or how many hits during that time, so, if it’s considered rude to publish those figures, or if I’m making an idiot of myself then I hope you’ll forgive me, and I won’t do it when I celebrate my 365th blog in 265 days time on February 1st 2013.
I haven’t counted how many subjects I’ve tackled in the past hundred days, but, essentially, it’s one, because I set out to talk about writing, although it’s two if you count the fact that I ‘talk’ an awful lot about the Mslexia competition, not least because it was responsible for me starting this endeavour in the first place.
I also haven’t counted how many times I’ve contradicted myself, or on which subjects, although I can be pretty sure that I have... no doubt severally.
I have name-dropped once or twice. I’ve talked about writers that I know like the husband and Ian Rankin, Lauren Beukes and Kaaron Warren, and writers that we’ve all heard of like the husband and Ian Rankin and... I’ve talked about my parents and the husband and the daughters. I’ve set up a Twitter account (@N_VincentAbnett) alongside the blog and have 365 followers; I have sent 2332 tweets. I’ve plugged the blog probably a thousand times in various places, and I have entirely rejected 2 blogs, which still sit in a file on my desktop, just in case I do ever decide it’s OK to be uber-snarky. We shall see.
As of right now, I have had 18,657 hits to the blog. So, who knows, maybe I’ll make 50,000 for the year. You know me, I’m goal oriented, so watch this space.


Today’s blog plug is going to Coco Malone. She writes and draws clever funny cartoons... epigraphs... vignettes... I’m not sure what to call them, but they’re gorgeous and often witty. No, I know it’s not really a blog, but you will want to come back and visit more than once. You can also follow Coco on Twitter @Coco_Malone.

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