It has been an eventful month. I’ve lost all track of time, but it was the beginning of October when I started this blog. After a frustrating few days trying to learn the WordPress language, I think I finally have a handle on things, and I am happy with how it is turning out.
I am grateful to everyone who follows the blog, and especially those of you who take the time to read some of my stuff and comment. Really, that makes it all worth doing.
I’ve put over a hundred pieces online in the last month, so I know some of you are sick of seeing the irobert emails telling you another new post is up. That madcap pace will level off now, but I still plan to post 4 or 5 pieces a week.
I was looking through the site stats, and I love how detailed WordPress gets with the figures; I know which country reads the most, what time of day is best for you, and what sort of works most catch your attention. The most interesting category, though, is ‘search word results.’
I was reminded of one of the old blogs I kept, or maybe the old site I kept. At the time I would look at the stats and one that struck me as curious was the search word results, and ‘igloos’ was always on the list. This means someone typed ‘Igloos’ into Google and somehow wound up on my site. I still don’t really get it, but it was the impetus for me to name a short story collection ‘Igloos’ in a sort of if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them mentality.
So that was years ago, and was mostly forgotten about until the other day when I was browsing through my stats here, and particularly the ‘Search Word Results’. Some of them are obvious; Fiction, Surreal, Songs, Chicago– all this makes sense and it’s easy enough to see the connection. But one stood out on its own, ‘People who make cat meow sounds on answering machines’.
Someone typed this into Google, and wound up here. It’s just so odd and random and strangely specific. I don’t quite understand, but if this is you, I hope you will speak up and let me know what you were actually looking for and what you think about what you’ve found. Curiouser and Curiouser.
I will not be naming my newest short story collection ‘People Who Make Cat Meow Sounds on Answering Machines’ mostly because it’s just a little long. But maybe I will make a point to write some more cat-centric stories, felines who have trouble setting up their cell phone voice mail settings or something like that.
It’s just a little odd, but unless this is the first post of mine you’ve ever read, you know I like things at least a little odd.
So, thank you all for reading, however you came upon my site, be it a link you found written on the back of a business card, or in a google search looking for cat impersonators for your outgoing message. Glad you’re all here, ecstatic that I write some things that people get a kick out of reading, and dedicated to spreading a whole lot more weirdness into all of your lives…
© Robert Emmett McWhorter
irobert.me 