2014: the wrap-up

On December 31, 2014December 31, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

2014 This will, barring something truly exceptional happening, be my last post of 2014; it is 6:58 PM as I’m typing these words and I fully expect to be asleep by 11:30. If I’m still up at midnight, it’ll be because I can’t sleep, not because I decided to be. I am an Old now, and we don’t have to worry ’bout no new year any more. I suspect it’ll get here whether I’m awake to see it or not.

Most of the interwebbery folks I pay attention to are fully ready to plant a boot in 2014’s ass as it heads out the door; I can sympathize, as little that was any good on any sort of wide scale has happened this year. There were a few bright spots (gay marriage is now legal in more places than it is illegal, for one) but not many, and the evil and carnage particularly of the last couple of months kind of overshadow it. Yeah, gay people can get married, but it’s basically legal to kill black people in large swaths of the country, especially if you’re a cop. That’s… not really a fair trade at all.

That said: personally? Particularly since May or so? This was the best year of my life. There’s really no reasonable competition, and in fact I’m hard pressed to name what year #2 might have been. 2008, the year I married my wife? 2011, the year my son was born? Okay, what was the second best thing that happened in either of those years? I have no idea. (Maybe buying our house in 2011. 2011’s got some chops.)

In 2014, my wife and I both received promotions and substantial raises. I won a $10,000 grant that allowed me to take the summer off from work and dedicate it to writing. I published two books and people paid me for them. And I had another piece of writing published by someone else. And those last two were lifelong firsts. That’s a remarkable year even before you get to the part where my son is finally old enough to be fun. And having this place around has been pretty cool, too. Good shit’s been happening in my family, too; my brother just announced his engagement, and we’re going to my cousin’s wedding this weekend– technically a 2015 achievement, but close enough. Yeah. It was definitely a good year for us.

And 2015?

2015’s gonna be better.

Watch me now.

2014: White House Year in Photos

On December 30, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn PhotographyLeave a comment

I already Tweeted and Tumblrd (Tumblred?) one of these images, but man, the entire set is just amazing. Check them out.

2014 in review

On December 29, 2014December 29, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking8 Comments

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 96,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

#Blogwanking for 2014: #WordPress and #Twitter

On December 26, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking15 Comments

Usual caveats apply: I’m providing this information because I think it’s interesting and I know some of you like to read about it; I’m neither bragging nor whining, just providing my data, which will be better than some of you and not as good as others. There will be one more 2014 wrap-up post sometime in the next few days where I break down all of my book sales for the year. That one will be interesting as I don’t actually know what the numbers are going to look like just yet. I haven’t actually tried to combine all of the spreadsheets Amazon’s given me into one place, much less combined all the places my books are available.

But unto the breach! Here’s what my traffic has looked like so far:

Sadly, the huge traffic surge in January and February has yet to repeat itself. The low point in the year was in April, and traffic has been on an upswing since September. I expect December to just barely edge November out, but not by much, since I’m not expecting much traffic on New Year’s Eve and the last few days were unsurprisingly very low-traffic. Interesting things happen when I look at the bar graph, though:

The highest number of visitors I’ve ever had was last month, at 3822, and this month is definitely going to be in second place for visitors overall by the time it’s done. I blame the surge of visitors on the Snowpiercer post; compared to January and February I have more people looking at the blog but they’re not looking at nearly as many posts. Historically I have a really high visitor to page view ratio; that’s been closing up lately as the Snowpiercer post attracts lots of visitors who don’t necessarily stick around. February 2014 had a ridiculous 4:1 page view: visitor ratio, which I can only attribute to it being frozen and cold outside and no one being able to leave the house.

Here’s the geography data, which is always my favorite part. First, the highest and lowest-visiting countries:

The interesting surprise here is Puerto Rico; I don’t think I’d had any visitors from the island at the end of 2013 and it’s in the Top 10 for countries/geographical regions/whatchamacallems for 2014. Here’s the map:

Pretty well filled-in, I’d say. The only countries in the Americas I haven’t seen traffic from are Cuba and French Guiana; I’m probably going to have to keep waiting for a while on French Guiana but I’m hoping Cuba shows up in the near future as relations between our countries continue to thaw. Kosovo is still a white spot in Europe, and I’m becoming more and more convinced that the way WP figures out geography actually makes it impossible for traffic in actual-Kosovo to register as being from Kosovo. Most of the rest of the countries that I haven’t seen traffic from are some combination of dictatorships, theocracies, sparsely populated, or desperately poor.

On to Twitter! There’s only one graph here, and I’ve fiddled with it a bit to show a bunch of information at once:

I have, as of this exact second, 3,532 followers on Twitter. (4,373 on the blog, by the way, but I don’t have a graph for that.) As you can see, nearly all of those have been this year, and 6/7 of them or so have been in the last six months. I’ve gone through two big surges where I was trying to aggressively add followers, one at the beginning of the summer and one in the last month or so. I’ve added fifteen hundred followers in the last four weeks, and I haven’t decided yet if I want this growth spurt to end at 4,000 or 5,000.

The way I’m doing this, by the way, is pretty simple. I use JustUnfollow’s feature where you can pull followers from other people, to make sure that the pools of folks I’m looking at are probably interested in the same stuff I am. So I might decide to look at people following, say, Sourcerer’s account. And I follow 250 or so people. A couple of days later, I unfollow the ones who haven’t followed back, which JustUnfollow makes easy. If someone catches my eye who doesn’t follow me back, it has a whitelist feature that will let me keep them so that I don’t accidentally unfollow. Lather, rinse, repeat. Generally about a third of any given group will follow back if I give them a couple of days.

This method, by the way, makes it essential that you use lists in Twitter, because once you’re following thousands of people your basic feed becomes a firehose that no one can pay attention to other than to catch a sense of what people are talking about. I have a list called “writers” that I put anyone I want to pay special attention to into; not all of them are writers but I haven’t bothered to change the name of the list. That’s just over a hundred people right now and is much more manageable; I generally put anyone in it who I interact with more than a couple of times and anyone who I find interesting regardless of whether they interact with me. Right now if I send out a Tweet it’ll reach 120 people or so if it isn’t RTed by anyone, and I’ve reached a point where most of my tweets will be responded to somehow by someone, which is nice. Twitter’s more fun if you’re talking to people, obviously.

The Facebook page has 96 Likes. It’s seen some attention lately, but I have doubts as to whether it’s ever going to have any real numbers– especially since my sporadic attempts to drive attention to it don’t seem to work too well.

I continue to accept any and all friend requests on Goodreads; I have 151 friends currently, which is more than my “real” account has on Facebook, which makes me feel like I’m doing something right.

Later this week, book sales. How did your blog do in 2014?

Merry Christmas, y’all

On December 25, 2014December 25, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting4 Comments

Generally, today is the lowest-traffic day of the year, which means I will either not be on much after right now or be posting every ten minutes since you’re not around to be annoyed by it. We’ll see!

Also, the boy let us sleep in until 8:30 and didn’t notice there were presents under the tree until we pointed it out; I assume that will never happen again.

The Top 10 New(*) Books I Read in 2014

On December 22, 2014December 23, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading9 Comments

I wrote this post last year and it proved pretty popular (and, not for nothing, it was fun to write) so there was no way I was passing it up again this year: the Top 10 New Books I Read in 2014, where “new” is described as “I hadn’t read it before this year,” not “came out in 2014.” As one of the books was first released in 1924, this is an important distinction.

Also, don’t take the specific number rankings too seriously past number three or so.

Broken Monsters, by Lauren Beukes. I got into a ridiculous conversation on Twitter after reading Beukes’ previous book, The Shining Girls, about whether Beukes qualified as a horror writer or not. I maintained that she was not, at least based on the evidence of that one book. Allow me to be clear: while this book has elements of the crime procedural to it much as The Shining Girls did, Beukes has mad horror chops, and this book is one of a very small subset of books that actually legitimately scared the hell out of me at a couple of points. Broken Monsters is twisted and fucked up in what turn out to be several terribly wonderful ways, and the title itself is wonderfully evocative of what’s going on inside. The two books I’ve read by her have both been great; as Beukes is South African, I’m not sure what percent of her work is actually available in the North American market right now but I can’t wait to dig into the rest of it. I know there’s more out there.
The President is a Sick Man: Wherein the Supposedly Virtuous Grover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and Vilifies the Courageous Newspaperman who Dared Expose the Truth, by Matthew Algeo. Let’s be real, here; this book would have made the top 10 just based on the title alone, which is spectacular; the fact that Algeo writes a wonderful, fast-moving, cinematic narrative history based on one of the more insane events in American presidential history is just icing on the cake. With that title it didn’t need to be good. It also has the advantage (at least to me) of being about Cleveland, one of our most obscure and creepiest presidents. Yes, creepiest; Cleveland’s relationship with his wife, Frances Folsom, who he met when she was an infant, is creeeeeeeepy. I won’t give you the details; they’re worth looking up. Good stuff.
The Blue Blazes, by Chuck Wendig. I read… three books by Chuck Wendig in 2014? I think? Wendig’s work sorta fits into what I’ve always called the “vampires fucking werewolves” genre and what everyone else calls “urban fantasy,” but The Blue Blazes is so gritty and brutal and nasty that I hesitate on including it there. Plus like half of it takes place in Hell. Wendig himself once nutshelled the book as “Man eats meat, fights Hell,” which is only inaccurate insofar as it minimizes the role of drug use in the story. I’d add “takes drugs” in the middle there. I learned what the word charcuterie meant while reading this book. This is one of the better-written books on the list in the sense of the words themselves making me want to eat the author’s brain and steal their powers; the main character is described as looking like “a brick shithouse made up of a hundred smaller brick shithouses.” It’s lovely. You should go read it right now.
The Bone Flower Throne, by TL Morganfield. I actually reviewed this one when I read it; I read it in May and it is still the only book I have ever read set in tenth-century Mexico. It won’t be for long, though; the sequel The Bone Flower Queen just came out and it’s already in my shopping cart at Amazon waiting for the holiday rush to die down a bit. Everything about this book is fascinating: the culture, the characters, the setting, the plot itself. It’s all so goddamn new that there was almost no chance that I wasn’t going to love the hell out of it.
One tiny warning, though: the names can be tricky. Each character has like four of them, so make sure you’re paying attention the whole way through or you’re going to lose track of who’s doing what to who really quickly, which you probably won’t want to do. This one’s worth the work.
Revival, by Stephen King. Yes, Stephen King, who somehow wrote something like four or five novels this year and managed to produce his best work in years in this novel. That sounds dismissive; I love King’s work and religiously purchase and read almost every book he releases (I skipped the new Dark Tower book) but the man is a whole entirely different thing unto himself and I don’t know that I expect to be surprised by him any longer. This should be right up there with It or The Stand. Revival blew me away; if it hadn’t been written by King I’d have been knocking people down to tell them about it, but he’s already the highest-selling motherfucker on the planet and I’m not sure he really needs my help. I need his help; Steve (ahem, Mr. King,) read Benevolence Archives, dammit! I was floored enough by this one that I made my wife read it to make sure I wasn’t crazy; she’s been telling people about it ever since. If you haven’t read any King in a while, this one is absolutely the book to come back with.
Steelheart, by Brandon Sanderson. I went back and forth on whether I should include this Brandon Sanderson book or one of the other two I read this year; his Rithmatist was a bit on the forgettable side, but Words of Radiance, the second book in his Stormlight Archives series, was also brilliant. I ended up going with Steelheart because I feel like it’s less likely that you’ve read it before, and you ought to have. I just had a conversation with somebody the other day about how superheroes don’t show up in books all that often; well, Steelheart manages to combine superheroes and dystopia in a way that’s pretty damn fascinating, with a clever twist ending and lots of promise for future work in the universe. Firefight, the second book in the series, is out… soon, I think? Definitely next year sometime, and it might actually be in the next couple of months. This is technically a YA book but it’s the kind of YA that adults can enjoy just as easily; highly recommended.
One Square Mile of Hell: The Battle for Tarawa, by John Wukovits. I don’t know what the deal was with this book; I found out about it somewhere, picked it up, and it sat on the shelf forever. I literally picked this book up and took it places with me on multiple occasions and it ended up back on the shelf unread; I don’t know what the hell was wrong with me or why it took me so long to get to it but the book is amazing. It’s about a single battle in the Pacific theater during World War II; basically an Allied attempt to take over a tiny little spit of land that had a Japanese airport on it, with a bit of detail about the lives of some of the soldiers involved in the battle for color. I find it hard to believe that Wukovits wasn’t at the battle given how detailed his history is– almost as hard as I find it to believe that anyone actually survived the battle. I know I praised Lauren Beukes’ horror storytelling up there and there’s a Stephen King book on the list besides, but for my money One Square Mile of Hell is the scariest book of the year, and the best nonfiction I read all year besides.
Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell. Yep. Goddamn Gone With the Wind. Technically I started this in 2013 but it was after I did the top 10 list for the year, so I figure I can count it 2014 under the ever-present “my blog, shut up” rule. I did a fairly extensive write-up of my feelings about the book right after I read it that I won’t go into huge detail about here; needless to say, while this book is generally about awful people and tries to sugar-coat some of the worst atrocities in American history, it’s still an amazing goddamned book and everyone who reads should make sure they read it. Yes, I know your reasons for not wanting to, do it anyway. Does Scarlett O’Hara’s genuine proto-feminist sensibility help any? The bloody thing is over 1000 pages and still manages to be a pretty fast read. You can spare a couple of days. Read Gone with the Wind.
Sunshine Patriots, by Bill Campbell. I was starting to worry about the overall quality of 2014’s reading (a fear that proved unfounded once I started thinking about it more) when Sunshine Patriots touched off a hell of a run; four of the books on this list are books I read in the last month. I will reread this book over and over again, guys, and the language of the book is the reason why. I’m attracted to powerful dialogue, and nearly everyone in Sunshine Patriots talks in this proto-Jamaican/Spanglish, slangy patter that was just absolutely a joy to read. The fact that the cover grabs you so quickly– Afro-Caribbean cyberpunk? Yes please— is only additional evidence that the book demands a close look. Of all the books on the list, this is the one I’m going to evangelize the hardest, because I’d never even heard of Campbell prior to Saladin Ahmed randomly doing a promotion for this book on Twitter, and the people I’ve mentioned him to haven’t known him either. I love finding new authors and I love exposing new people to what I’ve found; Sunshine Patriots is really something special and you ought to check it out if you like things that are good.
The Martian, by Andy Weir. I knew when I finished The Martian that it was going to be the best book of the year. I mean, Sunshine Patriots is a great book, but the challenge of 2014 was to find a book that was close to being as enjoyable as I found The Martian, and it just never happened. I should have hated this book; considering that I also released a book involving being in massive trouble and on Mars this year, and this guy not only was winning a bunch of book awards but apparently has Matt Damon starring in the damn movie already, I shoulda been mad at him. I’m not. His book’s better than mine. You should read Skylights anyway, because Skylights is pretty damn good, but… man, The Martian is an amazing piece of science fiction and you need to go read it. Just read my book first, because otherwise you’ll be all “This isn’t nearly as good!” and that’s not what I want. 🙂 I love this book and I want to hug Andy Weir for letting me read it. It’s the best book I read this year, by a long shot. Write more, dude.

Honorable Mentions: Reamde, by Neil Stephenson; Maplecroft, by Cherie Priest; Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard; The Enceladus Crisis by Michael J. Martinez; Lock In by John Scalzi.

So, what did you read this year?

Posts of the Year: 2014

On December 15, 2014December 14, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Reviews8 Comments

2014 Despite the weather today– fifty freaking degrees! Sweatshirt weather!– it’s probably about time to start doing some retrospective posts on 2014, and I figure I’ll start with Posts of the Year, since it doesn’t seem super likely that anything will be changing positions between now and January 1st. Here is last year’s edition; the rule for this year was that you had to be acquire the traffic after last year’s list to count for this one. There are a couple of posts that would be on both lists, namely In Which I Hurt Myself and Acquire Toys and The 10 SF/(mostly) F Works that Meant the Most to Me, but this post is all stuff that’s new since I wrote the last one.

Also, we’re doing a top 11, not a top 10.

MOAR BUTTZ, a tale told with pictorial accompaniment: January 16, 272 hits. This post is why this is a top 11; this is probably my favorite post of the entire year– I spent the entire time during the events this describes planning the blog post, and I was literally laughing myself to tears while I was writing it. I love this post.
In which I am still a bad student (pt. 2 of 3): August 2, 2013, 286 hits. This one’s interesting, and I had to think hard about whether to include it– because technically I wrote it in 2013, but it didn’t catch on until 2014. This is also the sole teacher post on the list, and is part of a three-part series on determining teacher quality. It’s one of my more thinky pieces.
Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: Super Why: March 6, 299 hits. True fact: at the time I wrote this, I was unaware that future seasons of Super Why actually added a talking dog to the cast. I have nearly revisited this post on any number of occasions, because the talking dog took a show I already hated and catapulted it somewhere… else. Somewhere darker. “Hate” isn’t even the word anymore.
In which my kid is weird as hell: October 13, 316 hits. There are a fair number of posts on this list that are generated somehow by my son; this one details his obsession with kicking hats that took over his life around Halloween. It’s fun.
And none could say they were surprised: on #Ferguson: November 25, 331 hits. I’m very gratified that this post has gotten the attention that it has. It’s the newest post on the list, too. I’m rarely completely serious around here; this is one of those times.
On “awareness,” with swearing: May 9, 367 hits. I have a theory that the angrier I am and the more times I use the F-word in a post, the more popular the post is destined to be. This one’s a little… intemperate. It’s about slacktivism!
Creepy Children’s Programming Review: Color Crew: February 16, 480 hits. The other thing that I need to do a lot to generate traffic? Review stuff I don’t like, as you’ll see below. I don’t dislike Color Crew as much as I dislike Super Why, although it’s a much, much weirder show. Interesting fact: all four CCPR posts (the other two are Peg + Cat and Curious George) are in my all-time top 20.
The Top 10 new (*) books I read in 2013: December 17, 2013, 577 hits. This is another one that was technically written in 2013 but was written after the top 10 posts list, and therefore it got nearly all of its traffic in 2014. The sequel to this is coming soon; right now my shortlist for my top 10 is 16 books long. That’s too many.
This one has some bad words in it: September 5, 2013, 852 hits. The third and final 2013-blew-up-in-2014 post; I got this one linked prominently in the comment thread on a Scalzi post, and it got a lot of attention. I’m not entirely sure it deserves to be here; it just happened to have a section that was perfectly relevant to the conversation going on over at his place, so I linked and got lucky.
Think before you post: February 16, 930 hits. This post combines lots of swearing and anger with a direct attack on a common Facebook meme, and ended up with a pretty high number of Facebook likes for one of my posts. It got linked all over the place and still picks up little surges of hits every now and again.
SNOWPIERCER: I hated, hated, hated, hated, HATED this movie.: August 5, three goddamn thousand three hundred and seventy-one hits. And, surprising absolutely no one, number one with a bullet, the goddamn SNOWPIERCER review. I am actually tired of this post, if I’m being honest. I hated this movie, although I enjoyed reviewing it, I haven’t come around to liking it since I reviewed it, and this post appears to have become home base for everyone on the Internet who sees this terrible, stupid little movie, wonders why it got such great reviews, and goes onto Google to search for like-minded individuals. Its popularity blows away anything else I’ve ever written– note that this is one of the newer posts on the list– and it’s still a rare day that it isn’t my most popular post of the day. I finally had to close the comments on it last week; people were starting to fight with each other and I am heartily tired of monitoring it. Stupid post. Stupid movie.

Anyway, that’s it: my 11 most high-traffic posts of 2014. I will have to come up with new rules next year to disqualify the Snowpiercer post, as I’m sure that it will still be tops on the list. It’ll be interesting to see what’s blown up in the meantime.

Anything that ought to be on here? Feel free to wander through the archives all day. 🙂

Election day, I suppose

On November 4, 2014November 4, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics9 Comments

I was the fourteenth voter of the day at my precinct. I didn’t get a goddamn I voted sticker. I’ve been voting for twenty years in three different cities and I have never once gotten a goddamn I voted sticker. What the hell is democracy even for?

This was a pointless little election. I voted a straight party ticket for the first time in my life, choosing stupid and incompetent over evil. There was little at stake locally; my House election felt (still feels) like a foregone conclusion, there was no senate or gubernatorial election, and most of the state races were fucking unopposed, which makes me vaguely furious. I don’t even want to know what the national returns are looking like.

Then there was the school board election. Our school board, as I think many do, has a lunatic on it. The young lady above is his daughter. She has recently lost a lawsuit against the school board and has taken her revenge, no doubt encouraged by her father, by running for the board president’s seat. There’s a fine tradition in South Bend for some reason of suing public institutions and then trying to run for office to control them when your lawsuit fails. As you can imagine, this often ends poorly. Her campaign signs were her dad’s campaign signs from the last time he ran for school board, with the “re” in “re-elect” covered with duct tape. So we’re running a class operation here. I didn’t have to look hard to find that photograph, by the way; it’s one of the first results when you Google her name and her Facebook page is public. Her qualifications for office (and this is not me being snarky) include being a bartender, having a couple of kids, and being pregnant. I assume at the same time.

I encourage young people to run for office if they feel like they can make a difference; our mayor, as you may recall, is one of the youngest in the country, and was not yet 30 when he was elected. (And I voted for him.) But he was also a Rhodes Scholar. Maybe you at least take the time to scrub the more strippery pictures of yourself off the internet before you run for school board. Or, y’know, maybe not; I am officially an Old now and don’t understand how these kids think anymore.

I will be in Louisville tomorrow, then Nashville tomorrow night through Saturday morning, then Louisville again for a while, then home. Expect some hotel room pictures, but I’m expecting to be crazy-go-nuts busy and there may not be much more. I will be working on the book, though. So there’s that.