Milestones

At 9:56 p.m. last night, I hit my 5,000th recorded site visit.* The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire began at the end of 2004 as a place for me to post my manuscript for friends to read as I ship it out to publishers. The first post, a practice post if you will, was a very personal one. I wrote a version of it as a comment on another blog to an online friend. I did not put the site meter on for several weeks after beginning the blog so I do not know how many site visitor's I've had. The numbers in the early days were so slim I could follow them reading the book chapter by chapter. There was a reader in New York City, another in France and one in Hong Kong. There was 42 and her daughter and sersan and a few others. I did not begin "blogging" stories about the supernatural until February 20 with this post about Hammer Studios. Though I shipped the manuscript out to another slush pile today, I'm still tinkering with it. However I'll be focusing more on the next stories and leaving that one behind. One thing I will not be leaving is blogging about the supernatural. I'm enjoying this as a hobby of running a news site, if you will, for supernatural news. Other sites such as DailyGrail, Fortean Times and the Book of Thoth provide links, but I try to blog the supernatural news with commentary and humor that can't be found elsewhere. And while the site meter stats are interesting - for instance, I learned the other day that my site is the number one site if someone googles in French for "vampire beauty" - I don't find it a good measure of the success or failure of my blog. I measure that by the amount of personal enjoyment I get out of doing it. And on that scale, this blog is tremendously successful.