I’m having an achy, miserable day. My shoulders are covered  in capsaicin cream, and heating up nicely. Better than the Tylenol that’s not doing anything at all.

I’m going through a hypochondriac stage, right now, so naturally, I’m pretty sure that I have schistosomiasis, and the gravelly little worms have migrated to my brain. No, I haven’t been wading in the Nile, lately. What’s your point?

It’s the beginning of the month, and that means that I’m thinking about goals.

The first day of the month, the first day of the (WordPress) week… the first day of the day… and all my counters go back to zero. For a while, this morning, I couldn’t even see my “August” visitors on the graph next to my “July” visitors.

I was looking at a Chrome extension my friend Juneta recommended, and it made me think about doing a series of read-along videos with some of the short stories from the Blog Hop. I don’t know how many of my stories are hitting at that age level, but the general idea would be to have the text on screen, with the author reading the story in a bubble next to the text, so that children could follow along or just listen.

A read-along with the author, themselves, reading.

I’m looking for something that could bring in the grown-up readers, too, of course.

This blog is just not going viral as rapidly as one might hope.

Okay. Yes. That was a joke. Yes. Really.

But I’m always on the look out for new ways of measuring progress.

Number of views. Number of followers. Number of countries I can fill in on my WordPress map. Surface  area I can fill in. (Suddenly I’m incredibly aware of the political situations in countries with large landmass that are missing from my map.)

And ideas come to me. I take some of them seriously, for a few minutes before I wake up. Of course, I can blog all the sharks in Nebraska. Uhm… the ones at that night club count, right?

Some of the ideas aren’t that bad, as topics go, but also aren’t all that related to anything in particular. Which is fine. My blog isn’t related to anything in particular, either.

And some of them are probably writer death traps. Blogging a story per day until the mountains crumble to dust. Blogging all of the TED talks in existence. Blogging serial killers and their favorite Sci-Fi franchises. Blogging my favorite random words, because… honestly, if anybody can stretch a single word into a blog post, it’s probably me.

Or… we could track down childhood friends and demand that they buy brightly colored throw pillows and decorative knick-knacks. And come on road trips with us. And maybe something with body paint. And we could blog the whole thing.

Yup. Those schistosomiasis worms are getting to my brain. If anybody has any good thoughts on how to publicize a website…

What are they?