A statistical landmark
For no terribly good reason I just checked the number of earlier entries in this blog. And discovered to my surprise that (a) I started blogging some time in March 2002, making this blog nearly five years old ... and (b) as far as I can tell, this is my 1250th posting.
I'm just pausing to boggle a little. To put it in perspective: the last novel I turned in was roughly 125,000 words in length. My average blog posting is considerably more than 100 words long — probably they average 500 words, as I've taken to writing longer articles less frequently. So the total corpus is probably equal to five books in length, and over the long term I average one posting per day.
Maybe I should put a cork in it?
Naah ....
Comments
Seconded on the "Naah ...." thing. 'Tis a fine piece of entertaining you have here, and if you stop we'll never see the bound and collected blogworks, will we?
Posted by: Harry Payne | February 11, 2007 10:37 PM
By no means put a cork in it! The bloglit must flow . . .
Posted by: Tim Walker | February 11, 2007 11:44 PM
You've got the wrong mindset - collate your blogposts, stick some guff about memes and sentient ivy plants around them, and use them as your next novel or to pad out the real work...
Posted by: Tony Quirke | February 11, 2007 11:52 PM
Well, Tony, for all we know this whole site (and indeed the entire "Charles Stross" persona) could already be a complex piece of performance art, with you and me as unpaid extras. Damn if I see how he's going to monetize it, though.
But Charlie is Scottish, and therefore a socialist, so perhaps he doesn't let that get in his way. :-)
Posted by: Johan Larson | February 12, 2007 5:13 AM
No no - Charles is a Yorkshire lad, he just lives in Scotland.
Though if your generalising; the only difference between a Yorkshireman and a Scot is one has whippets and a flat cap, whilst the other eats deep fried anything :P
Posted by: Serraphin | February 12, 2007 8:35 AM
Any chance of a similar exercise for the comments? I'd reckon there's probably considerably more non-Charlie content in there than there are posts.
Posted by: Alex | February 12, 2007 11:40 AM
Alex: none whatsoever. I used to use Quicktopics, but I'm not shelling out for their deluxe service ... and I can't be arsed writing a perl script to trawl the SQL database for my own words just yet. (Got a novel or sixteen to write first ...)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | February 12, 2007 12:14 PM
The only other blogger I read regularly, Grumpy Old Bookman, has done some similar thinking ... he reckons he has blogged about a million words in 3 years. Alas, he has decided to knock it on the head to spend more time doing other things so you, Charlie, have to keep at it otherwise I'll have nothing to read while our AS400 at work is offline.
Posted by: gmilton | February 12, 2007 12:39 PM
This is a different sort of writing.
Charlie, this blog makes you an essayist as well as a novelist. And it makes you other things; a man of letters.
Posted by: Dave Bell | February 12, 2007 12:45 PM
Oh, I'm not going to give up -- but I'm going through a patch of having nothing much to say (and working on a novel at the same time).
Posted by: Charlie Stross | February 12, 2007 1:05 PM
Well, please keep working on the new novel. Much as I enjoy this site that new book just peeping over the horizon whets my appetite far more...
Posted by: MikeB | February 12, 2007 4:28 PM
"but I'm going through a patch of having nothing much to say"
£20 says Charlie doesn't last the week...
Posted by: Serraphin | February 12, 2007 5:11 PM
Serraphin: I wouldn't bet on that -- I've got a con to go to in London on Saturday and two days of heavy marketing activity leading up to it. I don't have time ...
Posted by: Charlie Stross | February 12, 2007 5:16 PM
I never would have come across you if you didn't have this blog, and I've bought two of your books now. Perhaps it's not the best marketing tool, but there are benefits to it.
Posted by: liamtheobscure | February 12, 2007 5:33 PM
Second that. I discovered you by following a link from Brad Delongs econ blog.
Posted by: Steven Rogers | February 12, 2007 5:55 PM
Hell, Charlie, you get too much value from this blog to give it up. I would not be surprised if you haven't sold at least one hardback to each of the regular commenters, so it's a sales tool. In addition, it makes a great focus group. You've run plot and background ideas by us and gotten feedback often enough to be useful. Not to mention that we're useful and decorative.
I bet we could get a word count of your comments on the blog without access to the database. The HTML source I'm viewing looks structured enough to write a simple Python program to pull it apart and assign comments based on the Posted by: field. If I get some free time later in the week I can give it a whirl.
Posted by: Bruce Cohen, SpeakerToManagers | February 12, 2007 7:23 PM
Just completed The Atrocity Archives over the weekend.
Looking forward to getting The Jennifer Morgue soon.
You keep writing the blog and the books,
I'll keep reading them.
Posted by: Kite65 | February 12, 2007 9:45 PM
I just bought the Jennifer Morgue over the weekend. Stop blogging and I'll return it and buy it when it comes out in paperback!
Seriously though, maybe you can take some of your best blog posts and throw them together into a book of essays. Scalzi did that, didn't he?
Posted by: Jett | February 13, 2007 2:29 AM
Second the Bell numbers. Blogging makes you other things; a man of alphanumeric characters.
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | February 13, 2007 3:33 PM
Are you sure you don't want to write just one blog/rant on something?
Anything at all.
(I'll get that £20 you know :P)
Posted by: serraphin | February 13, 2007 8:13 PM
#!/usr/bin/perl -W
use strict;
use Blog::Rant(qw(political cynical irritable));
my $bignum = 100000000000000000000000000;
my $rant = $Blog::Rant->new("Iran");
$rant->theme("They're doing it again");
$rant->cynicism($bignum++);
$rant->cite("Dodgy dossiers");
$rant->cite("Monstrous cynicism);
$rant->conclusion("Oh noes!");
$rant->publish() || die $!;
exit 0;
Posted by: Charlie Stross | February 13, 2007 8:57 PM
And since I started my blog at roughly the same time as charlie, in large part because his pointed me at blosxom, I'll will have been blogging for five years as well...
Posted by: Martin Wisse | February 14, 2007 10:39 AM
Would sir care to pay by cheque or cash ;)
Posted by: Serraphin | February 14, 2007 5:09 PM
Hey, Charles, you missed a quotation mark on the perl code! :-) You need some coding to recover your 'leet skillz :-)
Posted by: David | February 15, 2007 6:06 AM
I should write a book, find me a publisher, Charles.
Posted by: Equus Pallidus | February 20, 2007 5:14 PM
#25: the publishing world is Full. HTH.
Posted by: Charles Stross | February 20, 2007 6:06 PM
Hell with THAT. Keep it coming, dammit.
(Though that book thing is intriguing. Wonder if there's any market for the oft-sporadic blog writings of a cranky pseudonym that OSC probably regrets nowadays?)
Posted by: Demosthenes | February 26, 2007 8:11 PM
Demosthenes: as Riverbend has a book out, at least in the UK, I'd say the answer to your question is "yes".
Posted by: Charles Stross | February 27, 2007 10:08 AM
Sadly, Charles, I'm not Riverbend.
Then again, who is?
Posted by: Demosthenes | February 28, 2007 2:35 AM