Day 366

As hard as it is to believe, this is the last day of the first year of my blog. It’s gone bloody quickly and some pretty big things have happened.

I do love a statistic or two, so I’m going to offer some up from the last 366 days.

I finished in the final three of the first Mslexia novel writing competition. I also met eight amazing women and made one very good friend out of the experience.

I got one lovely agent! Huzzah!

I wrote two and a half novels and some short stories.

I also wrote 315 blogs, including this one, which I realise wasn’t quite the one a day that I was hoping for, but isn’t a bad hit rate, and the total word-count for which adds up to approximately two more novels.

My blog was visited 65,000 times, which is about 206 times per blog, although the most popular blog has received 1100 hits.

Complete strangers have approached me as far away as Canada to tell me that they read the blog, which is a bit weird. It’s almost weirder that some members of my family read it.

I have plugged the blog more than a thousand times on Twitter. I call these ads ‘blogplugs’. I do it deliberately, of course, but I still get comments from people who are amused by the word, because they have misread it.

Although I intended to write about ‘writing and other stuff’, I do seem to write more about ‘other stuff’, and some of those blogs are among the most popular; they are very often the snarkiest blogs, too.

Sometimes I write about the husband, but when I do, I always make sure he reads what I’ve written before I post it; it’s only fair.

Not everyone that comments on my blog agrees with me, and sometimes the people that do agree with me do so for all the wrong reasons, but that’s OK with me.

I have come to enjoy blogging, and I intend to continue. I hope that my regular readers will continue to follow the progress of my blog, and that new readers will come along and maybe even stay for a while... But those last few weren’t so much statistics as statements, so maybe it’s time to sign off.

It’s been a pleasure!