Hello!

1) So the responses to my question last Friday were overwhelmingly of this nature.  “I like reading what you write five days a week, or maybe I just like knowing that it’s there and I could read it if I want to, but if you want to throttle things back to three days a week, that’s okay too.  You should do what you want, and I will support your decision.”  Apparently those of you who fall behind in reading updates don’t feel that fewer updates would help the situation.  That’s cool!

2) At the moment I’m entirely happy to update five days a week.  I’m trying to write several other things simultaneous with Primary Sources — novel, short stories, grocery lists, book reviews, all that stuff.  Someday I may declare that since it costs me about ten bucks a month to operate this blog and I make negative money off writing about Tristram and all his jerky behavior, I might take it down a notch to three times a week.  I’m not there at the moment, though.

3) On Friday I also saw a spike in my site traffic, which it took me a minute to figure out, but basically apparently I only register someone as reading the site via RSS if they actually open a link to the site rather than just look at the update in Google Reader (or whatever RSS reader other people use).  On any given weekday, usually, around five people come to the site via the RSS; I had assumed that was the totality of folks using the RSS feed.  In fact there’s more like 80-90 folks subscribed, apparently.  So that’s nice enough.  Not enough to make those big Andrew Sullivan, Xeni Jardin blogging dollars, but still, pleasant to see.  My site traffic needs to double only a few times before selling ad space becomes viable.

4) Something that I’m unsure about is how to proceed with Primary Sources once I finish Malory.  This is still a long ways off — we’re still not quite to the halfway mark by my reckoning — but I question my original plan of examining Romance of the Three Kingdoms, inasmuch as it’s just not the horrible mess that we know and love as Le Morte D’Arthur.  Giving this treatment to an actually good book would make for a different experience, one quite possibly less entertaining to you, the reader.  There’s always Herodotus.  His History is full of crazy nonsense, also it’s extremely long.  On the other hand, this was originally going to be Jeffwik Reads the Romance of the Three Kingdoms: A Blog Experience until I chickened out at the last minute and went with Malory instead. I’ve had a four-volume copy of Three Kingdoms sitting on my desk for almost a year. So I dunno.

5) Unrelated to everything else, if you’re a roleplaying games or story ganes person, check out my acquaintance Jason Pitre’s Kickstarter for his new RPG, Spark.  I heartily endorse this event or product; I playtested it several times while it was in development last year.  Spark pulls together elements from a variety of sources into a coherent, streamlined ruleset for narrating dramatic conflicts.  The gem in its crown, though, is setting creation; over the course of a couple of hours a group of people can use the tools it presents to collaboratively create a setting replete with its own themes, conflicts, details.  Setting creation does a terrific job of working to ensure buy-in, investment, and enthusiasm in the final product for all parties, which is great, because then you actually make characters and play in that world!  I’m a terrible salesman, but take it from me, Spark is worth your money and deserves full funding.

And, just to bring things full circle, I’m pretty sure Jason has asserted that he really ought to get caught up on Primary Sources but it just piles up so fast…