Hits on My Reading Blog

So last week, I discussed how the hits on this blog are pretty much the same after a full year of posts. My most successful blog, however, is a far different matter. As one can see in the chart below, hits pretty quickly (within four months--I didn't track the first three months) hit one hundred per month, and over the course of that first year tripled to three hundred.

The story continues. Since 2008, the number of hits on Short Story Reader has continued to grow, though the rate of growth has slowed significantly. Also, it's evident that the hits go up and down--especially during the summer--but the overall trajectory has been up, now usually topping nine hundred a month.

My Life in Charts Hits per Month

My Life in Charts is one year old. From what I can tell, though, it hasn't caught on with readers. I average about the same number of hits a year later per month as I did when I started--in fact, lately the projectory is down. In a few weeks I'll compare that to another blog of mine whose audience has grown steadily over the years it's been up, including just its first year.

State of My Underwear

In spring, I usually purge clothing, getting rid of clothes that have gotten to ragged to continue wearing. I did, this spring, for example, purge four out of twenty-eight button-down shirts. The worn-out shirts had severely frayed collars. It was a shame to see them go.

Apparently, I purged a lot more underwear last year than I realized, because I was under the impression I had more underwear needing to be purged than I thought. What is interesting, however, is the reason for the purging. It used to be mostly holes; this year, it's mostly worn elastic, as shown in the following chart:

Attempts to Get an Agent

So I have this novel I brought to a finish some time ago, and as of spring 2011, I've finally gotten around to sending it to a few literary agents. But until winter 2012, I never got beyond a form letter back. Finally, in February, an agent actually asked to see a bit more.

Really, when I think about it, I shouldn't be surprised. I have had to select people to hire at times in my life, and sometimes, you're pulling one person out of fifty--and there might be several who are qualified--and I'm sure it's like that for agents as well, only to a greater extreme.

So here it is, a pie chart showing the percentage of agents who sent me form rejections versus the percent who never even answered my query, and the lone agent who showed even some initial interest.

Postage per Year

The travails of the U.S. Postal System are well established. As people have moved toward e-mail and other electronic forms of transferring information, they have needed the services of the postal system less and less. I was curious whether my own experience would bear that trend out. 

In my case, however, there are a few things that might mitigate against a decrease in the amount I spend on postage each year. First, I have generally not moved toward using e-payment systems. Second, back in 2008, I decided to make a concerted effort to submit more manuscripts for publication than I had previously been doing. (I used to submit an average of about 20 manuscripts a year; I now submit about 120.) At the same time, however, more of more publications accept electronic submissions, which means that many of those manuscripts don't go through the mail.

So what does the record bear out? In general, despite the rise in manuscript submissions, the amount I spend on postage has, for the most part, gone down most years. At best, I match the postage of the year before I started submitting more. 

OkCupid Contacts

So a few months ago, I was talking with a female friend of mine regarding OkCupid, a free dating site. She's not impressed by many of the guys' profiles on there, like, What are these guys thinking? Nor is she often impressed by the messages they send. I was curious about the number of messages she gets per week, mostly because I wanted to see how that stacks up with me, as a guy. Unfortunately, she didn't answer the question directly; she simply said it depended on how often she was on. (This is a true answer, though; the more one is on, the more often one comes up in searches and the more likely you look like a person who is actively using the site and thus like a person who might be dateable.)

I signed off of the site in December, when another gal contacted me and I realized that I really wanted to focus on one gal in particular who I first went out with in August. I hadn't written to many women on OkCupid in a long while anyway, since I have a very specific kind of person in mind to date and haven't really found it there--nor did I ever really expect to. If I were more keen on just going out on friendly dates with no real potential of anything more than a new friendship, as I sometimes get in the mood to do, I might be tempted to write more women. Indeed, to my chagrin and disappointment, I have returned to a period, as of last week, where that again appears to be the case and have thus returned to having a posting on OkCupid and other such sites.

I suspect that on OkCupid I probably get a 10 to 30 percent return rate on my initial messages. Such seems to have been the case in my memory. My profile has typically been rather untraditional--and it really hasn't said much about me in an explicit form. And that seemed to work, strangely enough.

My Plenty of Fish profile (which I also took down in December and refreshed this past week), by contrast, is quite sincere and generally has received no responses. I remember once, a few years ago, writing to about fifteen women on there, receiving two "no thanks" replies, and only one message that led to any kind of communication--that is, a string of messages and a planned date. In the end, the woman decided she didn't want to go out on the day of the date and then stopped communicating. (As I recall, shortly thereafter, I ended up going out with a woman from OkCupid, one who replied back of probably five or so I messaged.)

On OkCupid, I am just goofing off--I am not serious. But that is probably less threatening and more amusing; the fact that a woman doesn't know up front the kind of person I am looking for leaves more room for anyone to e-mail.

And it also has led to a few people writing to me out of the blue, rather than me as the guy taking the lead. So here's how many women messaged me to say they liked my profile or didn't like it or just wanted to say hello or whatever, by way of introduction, on OkCupid, by month for 2010 and 2011:
So basically, as a guy, I was getting, in those two years, on average about one message out of the blue every two months. I'd be curious to know how this stacks up with other guys, as well as other women.

Miles Driven per Year

The miles I've driven each year have gotten higher over the course of the past six years, when I bought my current car. There's a notable jump in 2008, and that's when the only car rental company in town stopped allowing people to rent cars and drive out of state. Before, I'd always done long trips in a rental car; now I have to put the miles on my own car. My own car is nice, so the rental cars were often, in terms of comfort, a step down. Still, I don't like that an extra two to four thousand miles now goes on my vehicle per year.

Another big jump happened at the beginning of 2011, when my church split, as I now have to drive an extra thirty miles per week (fifty instead of twenty). In fact, because I bus to work and walk home three days a week, most of my mileage in a given year is for church--and those aforesaid long trips (this year, one to Texas and one to Florida).