Crunchy numbers 
4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 32,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 7 Film Festivals
In 2012, there were 96 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 365 posts. There were 262 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 242 MB. That’s about 5 pictures per week.
The busiest day of the year was March 6th with 946 views. The most popular post that day was Lesbian Book Fest, Last Day.
So far there’s been a total of 49,707 visitors and 2,823 comments. (I wonder if I can break 50,000 before the new year?)
Where did they come from?
124 countries in all!
Most visitors came from The United States. The United Kingdom & Canada were not far behind.
Attractions in 2012
These are the posts that got the most views in 2012.
“Some visitors came searching, mostly for arrows, story arc, victoria oldham, story arc diagram, and self esteem.”
I am most curious Victoria, what do you say to persons coming to your blog in search of self-esteem?
lol. those are just search engine terms that brought them to my blog. I’m pretty sure no one has ever actually spoken to me about self esteem!
Happy New Year Edward.
And to you and yours, Victoria. I’m quietly hopeful for the year ahead. I’m already into the second draft of my first completed book and I’m quite pleased that I didn’t go off the rails with the last third of it. I wrote it out in a legal pad while down in Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands. I didn’t have my laptop or anything else electronic, I had to rely on memory to keep things straight, a tall order for me under the best conditions, but particularly fretful with this book because the last third concerns seven characters pursuing their own goals over the span of a single night.
In the very dark garden of an English country house.
With one half of the characters trying to avoid the other half.
And I didn’t have my map of the garden.
I was tickled pink to discover that it came together very well once I grafted the hand written pages onto the electronic ones.
The thing now is to flesh it out, so to speak. I’m hopelessly dialog intensive, What I once heard an author refer to as “talking heads in a white room.” I see in my minds eye where people are, but it’s very much like a stage production. My characters have their scenes, there are set changes, but the story and emotion are in the dialog.
And the timing on this has to be…just so. It’s a farce, set in the Regency period, and comedic timing is not tolerant of mistakes. Farce isn’t slap-stick, although slap-stick can be an important element, but even with slap-stick, those pratfalls better be well timed or, well, they’ll fall flat.
Few emotional situations in human experience are as painful to witness as someone trying to be funny who isn’t. The same goes, in my opinion, for writing funny. Even one-liners, seemingly one of the most straightforward forms of comedy, need a setup before they are delivered. And the pros, like Ellen DeGeneres or Henny Youngman, they do their setup with no one the wiser.
It’s all in their timing.
The same holds for writing a funny scene. The characters aren’t just saying funny lines, they are being comedic while saying them. They have to have a set up.
And I’m pretty sure you had a post about this very subject in the not in the least distant past. Sorry.
Happy new year Victoria.
It sounds like you’re about ready to take my Self Editing Your Prose workshop–a piece by piece work through of your ms before you send it out.
Timing is paramount and often difficult.