Hope and the writer

An acquaintance told me the other day that every single last one of you are bots.

It may be true — for some reason my readership is down to ten most days. (Probably the fact that I was doing short NaNo updates, which aren’t all that interesting, I guess).

I’m still writing in my blog, and I will keep writing in it for one reason: Hope. Hope is the conviction that there will be better outcomes. It’s what helps us through those things we have no power over — after I have done all the corrections, the dev edits, the query letter improvements, I hope that I will get published. If I keep publishing blog entries and advertising them on social media, I hope I will have readers.

Hope is what keeps me going in the absence of progress.

Disillusionment with the Internet

My friends, this is why I wish I knew who read this blog:

Late last week, I got a barrage of 10-12 hits from Russia in a very short period of time, from a domain I discovered was a hotbed of bot activity. That means instead of a reader, Russia was data mining.

Two days ago, I hooked my account to Google+, and three things happened:
1) A foreign acquaintance had linked to me at one point, but unsubscribed as soon as I linked back to him;
2) I got a flurry of US hits all at once, which suggested a US bot;
3) Three people with almost identical profiles (Canadian or French, lots of inspirational posters, and then all sorts of ads for questionable loans, smart drugs, and a sugar daddy service. They had the same ads.

I’m an idealist. I’d like to believe that person from France isn’t trying to sell me modafinil. I’d like to believe that my Canadian audience is following me instead of using a borrowed personality to try to suck me into a scam. I’d like to believe that there’s a Russian teen out there who wants to understand writing better, and someone from Portugal who finds my writing interesting.

I’d like to believe I’m not setting myself up for more spam.
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I’m an optimist, I understand. I would like to believe that all of you are reading and getting something out of this blog, and that it’s helping me not only improve my writing skills but helping me make connections, real and caring connections.

I’m beginning to wonder if I’m deluding myself.

If ignorance is bliss

I should have been ecstatic about my blog stats yesterday, but I wasn’t:

At about noon yesterday, I looked at my stats for this blog and saw more hits on my blog than I’d ever had before from two countries, Russia and Portugal. Russia and Portugal were semi-frequent (in the case of Russia) or frequent (in the case of Portugal) visitors to the blog.

So, what’s the problem here? Webcrawlers. Bots. Robots. Spiders. Slimy bastards. Computer programs that investigate a blog to mine information, whether it be an email to send spam mail to (No, I don’t want to be a REAL man!) or who knows what purpose! If you look below at the circled diagram, you’ll note that the action started close to noon and peaked at noon, which is more activity than I get when I publish (see the spike at the far left).

Russia, according to my friend Dann (hi, Dann!) is a hotbed of bot activity, whether to feed addresses to a spambot, influence US politics, or look for coded messages. I hope to heck Russia’s looking for coded messages, so at least I can get a good short story about mistaken identity out of it. I had always imagined Russia to be an adolescent female who wanted a writing career. I’m disappointed to find out she’s not.

The US is probably not using a bot — I actually do have at least 16 friends who read this blog. But I don’t know most of them.

Where this really disillusions me is Portugal. I know nobody in Portugal, so that was my favorite mystery. I imagined Portugal to be a Secret Admirer, which is really a silly thing for a fifty-something woman to fantasize about, isn’t it? A younger fellow who’s too shy to actually give you meaningful information but courts your curiosity, and elicits laughter but no jealousy from your significant other? Women my age are more likely to get “Hi, surrogate mommy!” which is not flattering at all.

So I have lost a little spring in my step with the loss of my Secret Admirer fantasy. It’s okay — as I told Dann, I prefer the truth always.

But the fantasy makes for better stories.