The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire

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Wednesday, June 15, 2005

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.

6 Comments:

Blogger Carnacki said...

*Also I marked another birthday yesterday.

6/15/2005 08:01:00 PM  
Blogger Curt Purcell said...

Congrats, Benjamin! Hey, I just finished the original Carnacki stories, and am getting ready to start on your book (as soon as I finish my next GA book for this week).

Just curious--how are you pitching your novel? You've made it sound like the vampire angle doesn't seem to be getting you very far. Have you tried working the LXG-style crossover angle that you seem to have going on in the story?

6/15/2005 08:24:00 PM  
Blogger Carnacki said...

I've just sent a straight synopsis and the manuscript without much marketing. I cover the LXG-aspect in the synopsis. I noticed on the web version that it can be hard to read the "' quote marks properly. For somoe reason, and I'm not sure why, on some pages online the quote marks are in ariel and the rest of the text is courier. On my print copy the quote marks are correct.

I hope you enjoy it. If there's anything you don't like or think needs work, please feel free to shoot me an email.

6/15/2005 08:55:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Congratulations Carnacki, both on the birthday (sorry I missed it!) and on # 5000! I knew they would come if you built it.

Live long and prosper!

-42-

6/15/2005 09:39:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks 42!

6/15/2005 10:05:00 PM  
Blogger protected static said...

Happy b-day, Carnacki! And good luck w/ the book!

(Aren't search-engine referrals funny? I'm no longer in the top 10 Google results for "you goat bastard", so enjoy your, uh, fame while it lasts ;-))

6/16/2005 12:36:00 AM  

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