It doesn’t feel right not having a post at all in December, so here’s a quick round-up of where we’re at as we depart 2023. (If you’re wondering why I’m not posting a serial entry this month, where have you been?)

THE GOOD

The Accidental Time Travelers Collective Volume 2 came out earlier this month, and I have a short story in that once again this year, “Plan V”. (If you missed it, Volume 1 came out December of last year, and included my story “Free Will”.) There are both new and returning authors in this second anthology.

I pulled my story together in August, before school resumed, and managed to keep up with editing requirements as I yet AGAIN went through the toughest school term to date.

I also completed my 13th annual Christmath Parody, “Inequalities” this month, which was going to be delayed, then came out on time for all the wrong reasons. (see below)

I’ve spent a bunch more time on Mastodon in 2023, where there’s a supportive writing community, and I also joined BlueSky, which I look at occasionally.

I think that’s it for the good.

THE BAD

My new serial, “Angel Pasta”, which began in September, has not done well at all. It started in a promising way, with 15 views and 3 votes, but exactly one month later, Part 3 had only 6 views and 1 vote. I extended the time limit for a full month to no avail.

Part 4, which went up at the end of November, then had literally only 1 view for over 20 days. It got its second view and it’s first vote on December 19th, which honestly wasn’t enough motivation for me to do anything with it. Apologies if you’re the one voter who’s since been waiting.

I’ll still finish it, I always do, but what’s the point?

After over a decade of this site, I can’t get more than two people to care about my interactive serial writing. (I also feel like the second view was the first person coming back, since I said the next part would be “after Dec 20th”.) What’s wrong with me?

Related, March 2023 was my worst month for pageviews in 2023, at only 63 across 400+ posts. Then April, May and August were all below 100. The best month was way back last January, when I got 680 views. Possibly due to Volume 1 of the short story… but then almost no one stuck around? I suppose that’s the cynical view.

Motivation is lacking all around, I suppose. How does a person know when it’s time to give up? Any suggestions for what I might do instead?

THE UGLY

I’ve been dealing with Covid-19 over the holidays. Tested positive the afternoon of Dec 24th before I was going to meet the in-laws, and it hit me like a truck late that night. I likely caught it at school, despite how I masked with an N95 every day.

What’s followed has been a week spent in the basement, next to an air purifier on Turbo with a window cracked open, in the hopes that I don’t spread it to my wife or daughter.

So far so good on that front, at least. But it wrecked our travel plans and I’ve mostly experienced my daughter’s 5th Christmas by proxy. At least now I don’t get winded climbing the stairs as I did the middle of last week.

I’d say this has afforded me lots of time to write, except knowing almost no one’s reading my work, it really didn’t feel like there was much of a damn point there. Though I did finish the ChristMaths parody on time, as referenced above, because why not.

It got six likes on Facebook, which isn’t bad considering I barely post anything there any more. Why do I even.

Sorry if this post became a downer. Partly I hope to make your life seem better by comparison, as always.

THE COINS

I posted about this in September, but you probably missed it as I was introducing the new serial too.

A reminder, to end 2015, I had 42 coins from that year. During 2016 I got 37 minted coins (some in BC). During 2017 I got 20 coins dated that year (some before June). During 2018 I got 21 coins minted, during 2019 I got 17 coins of that year, then pandemic.

During 2020 I got one, plus a quarter to start 2021, so calling it two.

In 2021, there were also only two (and again the quarter might have been the start of February 2022, I don’t recall). Conversely, in 2022, I started getting current quarters in MAY. By the end of the year, I had 10 coins (half were quarters). But I think the death of the Queen put the halt on things.

For 2023, I’ve had one coin, a two-nie, still with the queen on it.

There are apparently black “goth” two-nies commemorating the Queen floating around, but I have yet to see one. Likewise a small number of 2023-dated coins with the King started circulating this month, but again, nothing I’ve seen.

And so, that’s been the year.

Another year of questioning why I still write.

It’s not like I couldn’t be using the time for something more productive.

I don’t know, I’ll get back to it, I always seem to, perhaps because I can’t take a hint.

I do hope your year has been, if not positive, at least full of bright spots you can focus on. Me, as noted, I do have the short story, and my daughter (with the yearly calendar I put together of her too), along with the fact that I haven’t yet infected her with a debilitating disease, which is something.

Take care, hope to see you visit my site in 2024.

A column about nothing

You know, it’s important not to rely too much on technology these days. It has the habit of breaking down when you least expect it, and at the worst possible time. Think about it: why should we trust something labelled as “terminal”? It’s not like server tips are defined as helpful hints anymore either; they’re the physical action one performs on the hardware.

In the small apartment, hidden within one of the higher dimensions of the sixth floor of MC, Sine wanted a byte to eat and was considering frying bacon. But instead he decided to attack Nachos - bacon was the lassar of the two evils. He was interrupted, however, by the arrival of eLAN. She had come by to pick up the floor mat from her car, which Sine had borrowed.

“Why did you need this anyway?” eLAN asked, merrilly retrieving it. “Just because it’s shaped like a chess piece?”

Sine shrugged. “My parents were coming by and part of my floor wasn’t kleene. So it’s what I put your fine knight auto mat on.”

“Ah,” came the response. “And your parents are gone now?”

“Yeah, they left just before all the network malfunctions,” Sine confirmed. “What’s bothering me now is just an inability to track down the original cause for the troubles Hooke was having!”

eLAN nodded. “I suppose as the secret head of the Maintaining Flawed Computers Federation you were landen in hot water?”

“Not really,” Sine admitted. “But it affected my comedy routine. No laughs, everyone just chanting ‘Get the Hooke’!”

“So what are you doing about it now?”

“Well, I’ve eliminated Neumann as a suspect. He’s been busy with his mailbox hopper. Actually, I’m starting to think the source of the failure was a band of Hookers.”

“Hookers?” eLAN wondered.

“Yes, a secret organization around here investigating Hooke! I discovered them when I took a table and began to markov change in behaviours. I’m currently working on a .plan to…"

It was then that the conversation was further interrupted by the arrival of Cray-mar, who burst in the door, scattering things all over laplace. “Hey, Sine, do you have a ski I can borrow?” he inquired, looking about.

“Yes, but I think it would be the wronski for you,” Sine observed. “The size is incorrect; it barely fitch me.”

Cray-mar paused. “So does that mean you won’t or you cantor-“

“A ski??” eLAN interjected. “Why do you want ascii?”

“I have someone from Germainy over. She was going to show me the trick that put her into l'hopital.”

“Look, could U NIX that idea, Cray-mar?” Sine protested. “I was just in the middle of some complex analysis.”

“i see,” Cray-mar remarked.

“I should deque you both,” eLAN muttered, wondering if she’d need to display hermite. “These discussions are boring, so I’m no longer taking debate.”

“Oh, hey, Sine that reminds me! When your mother was here, she was bored, so she washed a board,” Cray-mar declared.

“Oh? What board?” Sine mused.

“The motherboard, naturally,” Cray-mar retorted.

“My mother washed the motherboard?” Sine gasped.

“Yes, shortly before she got on the bus.”

“Well, no wonder there were problems then!” eLAN remarked.

“I don’t believe it!” Sine cried out. “And I had to pay so much cache to buy a new one!” Conversation was suspended for a bit, as Sine punched cards.

“Hey, if you don’t have a ski, can I take descartes you decked?” Cray-mar eventually asked.

“Sure, picard, any card…" Sine muttered. Cray-mar quickly grabbed the entire set and hurried back to his own address space.

“And I’m leaving too,” eLAN added. “Because you know, I don’t think there was a kernel of truth to any of this.”

Sine shrugged. “Well, I still wouldn’t have been surprised if Hookers were up to something…" was all he could say in conclusion.

And once again, all was quiet on the higher dimensions of the sixth floor.

-Greg “hologrami” Taylor

[Everything that looks misspelled (lassar, landen, germain-y, etc) is actually the name of one of the computer servers at the University at the time, which were in turn named after mathematicians. There’s at least 15 in there (including subtle ones like bacon). Then there's also the usual puns, like 'finite automaton' aka finite state machine.
This appeared in Volume 79, issue 4, Feb 26, 1999, so again about four months after the previous entry. We add eLAN to the cast. Maybe I wanted a computer pun series, to branch out? I have no idea. There's only one more.]

A subsidiary of Quantum Loop Enterprises

Theorizing that one could time travel within their own lifetime, Doctor Sham Breakit stepped into the Quantum Loop accelerator… and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mere images that were not his own, and driven by unknown source code to arrange history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Hal, an observer at run-time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sham can see and hear. And so Dr. Breakit finds himself looping through life after life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next loop… will be the loop $home.

“Sham, we got problems,” Hal Calalilli asserted as he entered the imagine chamber.

“No kidding!” replied Sham. After dispensing with Elly by sending her on her rounds, Sham had spent the last hour looking about the l’Hopital. “Hal, everyone here is talking in math riddles or doublespeak!”

“Sounds like the joy of lex.”

“Hal…”

“Sham, you’ve handled worse,” Hal said. “Now, back in Stall-Eons Gate, New Mexico we’ve got real trouble! Your parallel hybrid computer BigE is having a mental breakdown. Sushi and Xina can’t fix her, so it’s up to… er, Dr. Geeks.” Hal caught himself before mentioning Sham’s wife Drawna WeeBTree, or Sham’s daughter Shammy Pro Filer.

“So I guess you don’t know why I’m here,” Sham sighed.

Hal tapped at his TI-85 calculator. “No, but we know the woman in the fating room is Dr. Waterson,” he offered.

“Doctor! Doctor Waterson!” called out Electra Lysis as she rejoined her associate. “Sir Cul wants to transcend dental work and eat pie. There’s also trouble with Jacob, Ian and May tricks. Oh, and Zeke wants help tracking down new classical records, but I just told him ‘Stop playing Haydn, Zeke’.”

Sham winced. “Stop speakin’ like that,” he pleaded.

“Like what?” Elly inquired. “I didn’t mean to go off on a tangent. Though I often strike a chord when not aligned with the story arc. But my maxim is, ‘If you’re cut, seek aunts’!”

“Sham, I was wrong,” Hal sympathized. “No matter what it takes, we’ll get you out of here.”

*

However, it was a few days before Hal could return with good news. “You won’t believe this, Sham,” he revealed at last. “The underlying situation here is a peculiar punctuation problem.”

“You positive?” Sham mused. “Because the Hopital logs show even their elementary operations involve calculations that are way off base.”

Hal flinched. “You’ve been here too long, Sham.”

“The trouble is I can’t project the point of origin for these errors!” Sham looked up. “Uh, Hal, can’t you wear proper ties?”

“Sham, what you need to do is make sure Dr. Waterson and Elly Lysis team back up with Max Value and his wife Ana. Elly’s presence is necessary to crack this missing punctuation case.”

“But what about the stats here? The error vectors on this scale are—”

“Stop it, you’re going dotty!” Hal interrupted. “Just get Elly to the Fourier Factory!”

“Wait, that’s it,” Sham realized. “Decimals and periods are both dots! There’s the connection, it even explains the missing cases of colon cancer. Brilliant, Hal!”

“Oh. Well, it was adjoint effort—” Hal stopped himself. “Anyway, just get that clique of people I mentioned back together so you can loop out of here.”

Sham quickly co-ordinated things. “But Hal,” he realized even as he left for the Fourier Factory. “I haven’t im-parted any mathematical information yet, like how there are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible positions for a Rubik’s cube. How can I loop?”

Hal shrugged. “General l’Hopital is just less educational.”

Indeed, Sham did loop upon his arrival at the factory. However, the story did not end there.

*

Still going…

-Greg “hologrami” Taylor

[Was this worth it, to hear about Shammy ProFiler? Or about Hal's properties? Well, here's something more random: Sham's "stop speakin' like that" line was a direct reference to FASS 2001, the February 2001 show for which I was CSW (chief scriptwriter). I'd written in a character who constantly spoke in music puns - a role I was ultimately cast into. In Act II scene iv, s/he was told to "stop speakin' like that". Weird that I still remember that 20 years later.

Anyway, that concludes Quantum Loop's bonus episode of 2001. Two more parts remain in the Hopital!]

How was my 2020? Consider I started writing this in February 2021, and now it’s April. To be fair, I hadn’t planned on posting it until around now anyway, but I’ve been busy. Very busy. Forgive me a brief digression.

I’m sure for some, pandemic life has been more productive, but for me, high school teaching has sucked away all my free time. The need to devise new lessons for a new hybrid system ensures I only have time for grading on the weekend. (My prep period can’t be used, it only occurs every couple months - when it runs for a full week. A better system was rejected by Ontario’s Ministry of Education in late August.)

On top of that, in September the timetables shifted and I got a course I haven’t taught in six years. This, on account of students moving to full virtual school, collapsing the in-school sections. Fine, but it meant no chance to prep that over the summer. (Requires research. Finance has changed in that time, for example no more Canada Savings Bonds.)

Oh, and one class in 2020 was 32 students, my largest ever, owing to the new 2020 collective agreement under Ford’s Conservatives, and their bizarre hate for the education system. (They want bigger classes and mandatory online learning.) And while our Board’s in-person classes are split by cohorts (that one 16-16) to fit people into a single room, it does double the workload because the cohorts get out of synch.

But anyway… I blogged elsewhere about a lot of that. And let’s not even get into last March-June 2020, with my two year old at home with us. Digression over.

POST SCHEDULING

With that, you might have noticed there’s been longer delays between posts. (So much for the projected “gradual easing” of my schedule from last year’s February 2020’s recap, ha ha.)

The post-every-two-weeks pace actually DID continue through the end of the school year, and the summer, only needing to be sacrificed in October 2020. Partly school related, and partly me doing Time Untied prep for November’s NaNo (since “Epsilon” was experiencing the usual low engagement).

We had one “Epsilon” part only for: Oct, Nov and Dec. (There was also an Untied Characters post in Nov, if you missed that.) However, given Index and Behind the Scenes posts, that still closed out the year with 26 published posts in 52 weeks, only one less than in 2019.

The good news is, this meant page views went up from 2019 - to 1,635 - with overall more comments (eight, not including my responses). The bad news is, “better” is still the second worst of all the 6.5 years the blog has been running. If the pandemic was leaving others bored, they weren’t looking at my blog.

Not like I’ve had time to do ANY marketing, of course.

Deeper Stats: The best month for page views was October 2020 (someone actually reading Time & Tied, not sure if they got all the way) with 376. The worst was August 2020 with a mere 57 views (fewer than two per day), which was when “Epsilon” was still on track.

The first episode of Time & Tied was still the highest hit (ignoring Index page counts) with 52 clicks, followed by the start of Epsilon’s third series with 33. Beyond that, we go under 20. The three largest countries of origin were the US, Canada and the UK (all with over 100 page views, though the US leads substantially). So not Sweden this time.

What does this all mean?

Mostly that I have no time for analysis. Let me know if you see something. At this point, we’re going to continue with every two weeks going forwards, even though it will be reruns. See that poll below; first I want to talk about our Time & Tied sequel yet again.

TIME UNTIED

[caption id=“attachment_2644” align=“alignright” width=“212”] JENNY IRVING
Commission by: Mharz[/caption]

A quick recap up to 2019: My early writing for “Untied” dates from 2014, before I had even posted up Carrie Waterson’s first stories. I restarted from the top for NaNoWriMo 2017, managing 39,372 words by early December. I did edits for it the summer of 2018, splitting it into four files. November 2018 saw an additional 29,225 words, and by January 2019 we were at 6 files with over 65,000 words total.

November 2019 added another 33,373 words, pushing that total near 100k. I since took some time in March 2020 to tidy the formatting, yielding over 7 files (maybe 15k words each), and then again revisited the writing in July 2020.

October 2020 is when I started Revision III, taking two weeks to work up through everything from the start. (At the same time creating a Time Tracker, as I’d realized I would need it for the various timelines going forwards.) At this point, we were past 125,000 words.

November 2020 put in 32k more, so now we’re past 150k AND past what I consider the halfway point. So that’s something. (It then wasn’t until early March of this year, 2021, that I had time to tidy things up a bit more from Nov 30th.)

I really really hope you enjoy it when it arrives. ;.;

As far as coins go for 2020 - read “Time & Tied” if you don’t understand why this is interesting - the pandemic has done the unthinkable for me and made cashless the default.

Yes, coins and a pandemic do not mix well, though I did occasionally pay with cash. Either to keep my debit payments low (not all places take credit cards) or in all honesty to see if there were 2020 coins out there.

Fun fact, in the USA there was a reported Coin Shortage (that’s an article from July 2020, updated in January). This problem last summer actually resulted in MORE minted coins in 2020 as compared to previous years, but also with rationing of the inventory (so we see less). Supposedly the situation is now stabilizing.

Of course, I live in Canada.

Consider, to end 2015, I had 42 coins from that year. During 2016 I got 37 coins minted then (some in BC). During 2017 I got 20 coins minted that year (some before June). During 2018 I got 21 coins minted that year. During 2019 I got 17 coins minted that year. During 2020 I got one.

Yes, one. A toonie, in the fall. Commemorative, so that’s something.

However when I was returning some empty wine bottles to the beer store in the first week of January 2021 (after the holidays), I got a quarter as part of the change. So I’m counting it. Partly as proof that they exist. Image included, as usual.

What will 2021 bring? A lot of staying at home as Ontario’s Conservative Government misfires on the vaccine rollout, it would seem. I may stop tracking coins altogether.

FUTURE POSTS

The other options were all tied, those being:

1. Marmalade Mercury, a fusion fic. Sailor Moon R meets Marmalade Boy.
2. The Girl Who Speaks With Algebra, Rose Thorne’s origin as a crossover with MathTans. It has been posted elsewhere (like Wattpad during NaNo) but not on this site.
3. Parody Stories (involving puns and send-ups of Quantum Leap). Once posted in mathNEWS (while I was at University) and don’t seem to be on that site any more.

So which would you prefer?

[crowdsignal poll=10812930]

As I mentioned, the plan is still to go every two weeks. That should give me time to do any edits. In addition, WordPress seems to have gone full on with their New Editor; I can’t call up the Classic Editor any more.

Well, okay, I was able to back door my way in for recent posts (including this one), but looks like I’ll need to figure out how to realign images and handle HTML in the new system. That will take time.

Incidentally, if you missed it, there was another April Fool entry this year. That brings us to a total of five since the blog started in Sept 2014. (Six if we count 2017’s Any ~Qs on the comic blog). We had 2015 for “Epsilon 2”, 2016 for “Epsilon 3”, 2017 for “Time & Tied 4”, 2018 for “Virga Mysteries” and now 2021.

In fact I was a late addition this year due to a dropout and Alexander Hollins approaching me, so thanks there. Initially I didn’t expect time to read, let alone write. (I haven’t done anything with the Time Travel Nexus in over a year either.) So I really do appreciate that you, dear reader, are still with me.

The polls in the last “Epsilon” entry are still open, if you didn’t get a chance to vote. Feel free to drop a comment if you want to elaborate on anything, or have questions about things like “Time Untied”. And take care of yourselves out there.

See you in a couple weeks.

[caption id=“attachment_342” align=“alignleft” width=“150”] Author (mathtans), as depicted by Errol Elumir[/caption]

Welcome! I write serials, some of them based on a plot that YOU vote for. Yes, you! And the voting is usually really close, meaning odds are high that you will definitely affect the outcome at some point.

We’re gearing up for our sixth “Epsilon” story here. Each story is stand-alone, but if you want information on the various characters that reappear, see this post from last week. (There are also votes in THAT post, which I’m taking into account going forwards. Already seen that post? You can add to your prior votes since I have a one-week timeout! You’re welcome.)

The first thing we need to decide is what genre I should aim for. I cannot guarantee that we’ll stick there as voting continues, but many prior stories have mixed it up… where should my initial focus be?

[crowdsignal poll=10543281]

The other thing to decide is how key certain characters should be, relative to each other. For instance, Alice Vunderlande is running away with the vote on that prior post I mentioned… in the Epsilon administrators category. If the choice was between her and, say, Para, would she still win?

To clarify how your vote below connects to that prior post, if you vote for the regulars, the winner of the prior vote will be in the story (along with others, most likely). If you vote for the station character below, that prior winner will become part of the mission. And if you vote for the minor character below, it means whomever won that prior category will appear.

In the case of a tie (either place), I’ll likely pick my own preference (same if you vote for a mix). But I will offer at least a cameo to the other choice. Make sense? Vote away!

[crowdsignal poll=10543286]

The plan is to close the polls on May 3rd, in one week. I’ll then need a week to write the first part, and so we go forwards from there with a new part (and vote) every two weeks, the vote closing after the first 7 days.

How long will the story go? I have no idea, tends to be between 12 and 18 parts… did I mention I have no real plan, just a vague idea, and from there it’s all your votes?

One last, thing - a final “Virga Mysteries” post will tide you through the start of May, namely the “Behind the Scenes” explanation of how that story evolved over more than a decade. (For those just joining us, I’ve been running that serial for the past year.) So look forward to that update.

Thanks for reading, thanks for voting… and thanks for spreading the word? (I mean, my birthday is this week too, so it’d be cool to get a few extra votes… just saying.)

Until next week!

Hello, my readers! Life has been busy, as you can tell by this site’s wrap-up post for last year (2019) happening in the middle of February 2020. Full time work, and family time including my one year old daughter, are keeping me very busy. (As was being very sick at the end of December.) But I have wanted to take a look back for a while now, as I have a few things to say.

First, Virga’s Mystery’s “Balancing Act” has now been running for over a year; it began at the end of January 2019. I had debated splitting it up partway with another “Epsilon” story, but found myself with very little free time in the summer, and opted to use that time to finalize edits instead.

Yes, there was a bunch of editing that took place for “Balancing Act” from its July 2012 origin. Notably separating it into parts, giving Trixie more personality to do her own thing (rather than tying her to James), and generally explaining more about the world I’d touched on in the early cases (in particular during the big time skip).

However, Melissa Virga’s story will be ending shortly. Meaning something new in April 2020. That will likely be a return to “Epsilon”, as my schedule is gradually easing, but it could still be more runs of old writing. Do you have a preference? If Epsilon, will people will be interested enough to vote?

That said, I am pleased that I’ve maintained the posting schedule of every two weeks, ever since I shifted to it in July 2017 (during “Epsilon 4”). So if you want reliability, I’m here for you. But see more on site statistics below.

TIME UNTIED

Secondly, work on my sequel to Time & Tied is still progressing… very slowly. Here’s a picture of Heather Bright, which I commissioned when I somehow made it to Anime North 2019. She’s the new time travel tech for Carrie, now that they’re at University. Many of the characters like her are in my head, even if their words are slow to hit the page.

As a quick reminder, my early writing for “Untied” dates from 2014, before I had even posted up Carrie Waterson’s first stories. I restarted from the top for NaNoWriMo 2017, managing 39,372 words by early December. I did edits for it the summer of 2018, splitting it into four files. November 2018 saw an additional 29,225 words, and by January 2019 we were at 6 files and over 65,000 words.

There wasn’t much writing time beyond that, as I went from part-time back to full time work. Still, November 2019 added another 33,373 words meaning we’re almost at 100k - and we’re almost at what I’d envisioned as the halfway point. So it seems we’re looking at a run of at least 4 “Books” again (as I did with the Time & Tied), assuming it all goes as planned.

A reminder that I can’t release the first part until the second is done, as the time travel aspect means some earlier scenes might need redoing. But that’s fine, as certain secondary characters are finally showing more of themselves, meaning I can give them more personality in those early scenes too.

To be clear, this is my priority as far as fiction writing goes (I’m not including non-fiction efforts for the Time Travel Nexus), which emphasizes how much little time I’ve had in the past year for writing at all. And reading, for that matter. I’m behind on other blogs, and I haven’t done much with Comic Tea Party in over half a year. Thank you for your patience.

As far as coins go for 2019 - read “Time & Tied” if you don’t understand why this is interesting - I got 3 toonies, 1 loonie, 9 quarters, and 4 dimes. That’s a total of 17. (I had 16 until Christmas, when I got an additional quarter driving home.) No nickels, which made me wonder if they minted any, but I got one as change just yesterday, so they’re out there. There were also special D-Day commemorative toonies, but I only got one as change in early January, so it’s not pictured.

I’ll probably keep an eye out for 2020 coins. Inflation is still a thing, meaning they’re still printing more money.

STATISTICS

My pageviews for 2018 totalled 2,429… and we’ve backslid to 1,492 for 2019. Granted, I have barely had time for any promotions. I auto-tweet out the current parts, and post them to my Facebook writing page whenever I remember. I did add “Balancing Act” to the Web Fiction Guide listing, and it came up in mid-May on their front page, but that’s about it.

Granted, that listing did help break up a rather impressive stretch of decimal views, which had been going on for over a month.

Decimal views means less than 10 views (in this case, under 5 views) per day, for 30 days. Because WordPress turns the scale into decimals. It actually happened twice in 2019, once for March through to May, and then again for October through to mid-December. Is that impressive? I mean, it’s likely something others cannot claim to have experienced in the fifth year of their blog being around.

My most popular day for 2019, as far as I can tell, was May 28th. That day saw about 52 page views. Most days had less than 15. Strangely, there’s been 9,249 spam messages blocked for the duration of the blog; I’m not sure why they’re so interested.

How many people have read through all of Virga’s story? Act 2A (from April) has only 16 views, while Act 5A (from November) has only 9. But that 9 is fairly consistent with the page views of posts afterwards. (Granted, last week’s posting has 3 views so far.) As to comments, I had 3 for the whole of 2019 (6 if you count my replies). Thanks to mathhombre (March/Sept) and chaosbeast (Nov).

The posts with the most hits (aside from the indexes) were Virga’s Act 1A (77 views), TT1 “Timely Discovery” (72 views), and Epsilon 3.1 “Data Integrity” (38 views). Those were followed by other Virga entries beyond 1A. Kind of nice that some of my older posts are getting looked at, even if people aren’t continuing to read. Top countries (over 100 views) were the US, Canada, and for some reason, Sweden. Thanks for coming out!

I believe that concludes everything I’d wanted to say. If you’re running your own website, hopefully it’s doing better. At any rate, I’m pleased about my consistency, and given the opportunity I wouldn’t have changed my priorities.

Final questions, would you like to see another “Epsilon”? Are you still interested in hearing about progress on “Time Untied”? And will you miss Melissa’s story at all? Feel free to drop a comment to let me know. Either way, hope you stick around, and thanks for reading.

The last part of the “University Witch”/“Virga Mysteries” cases runs tomorrow, finishing off June. So, as per usual, an “Epsilon” story will fill the void between pre-written stories. In theory, school will finally be out, giving me lots of time to write, but in practice, I now have a baby daughter, so she gets priority… meaning we’ll stick with updates every two weeks.

As far as plot voting, I’m tossing out some pretty generic plots here, because (as usual) the whole story gets made up on the fly, and I don’t have much of a scaffold in mind yet. (Very busy time of year.) Feel free to offer comments on why you picked what you did, in terms of anything you’d hope to see.

[polldaddy poll=10038258]

[caption id=“attachment_183” align=“alignright” width=“107”] CHARTREUSE[/caption]

As far as character voting goes, Chartreuse will return from “Wish Fulfilment”, now that all of “Time & Tied” has been put on the blog. She had the highest votes after first appearing, but I wanted to get her backstory out as a matter of record. This story would then take place after all previous stories involving the mystical bisexual teen, but before “Time Untied”.

Should she appear with someone else? Let me know!

[polldaddy poll=10038259]

Thanks for reading, do consider voting and following along. After almost four years of regular posts, it would be nice to keep more than four people interested. Helps with incentive and all that.

Polls will close at MIDNIGHT after Sunday, July 1st, or that’s the plan for now. Spread the word.

In May 2017 this blog got 1933 page views from 330 visitors. In May 2018 (last month) this blog got 75 page views from 48 visitors. Literally the highest and lowest monthly statistics we’ve ever seen for my serials.

Welcome to another deconstruction post, with a look at where we’re going. Maybe it will also make you feel better about your own statistics.

STATS + CONTEXT

[caption id=“attachment_2161” align=“aligncenter” width=“620”] MONTHLY STATS, June 2016-May 2018[/caption]

Caveats: There’s been only 35 new posts over the past year, after I shifted to posting every two weeks, following rather disheartening voting results in July 2017. (Viewership also declined when I started posting more frequently though, so who knows.) In addition, the entries haven’t been for “Time & Tied”, as that serial concluded at the end of May 2017. “Epsilon Delta” ran from June to December 2017, then “Virga Mysteries” took us from January 2018 to June.

The weakest performer of “Epsilon Delta” was Part 15, with 15 views. (Others earlier on reached 17 views - some even more than 30.) “Virga Mysteries” has had a cooler reception, only 10 people reaching the end of Case One, and only 4 people starting Case Three last month. And before you say it hasn’t been around as long, the latest views were the day of publishing, and no one’s looked at “Epsilon Delta” in 2018 (the “fave character” poll sits at 4 votes), so time doesn’t seem to be a factor. You either see me the week I publish, or never.

Rev Fitz has reminded me of people who have subscribed, and don’t visit the website. I do have 18 “followers” and 2 “email followers”, whatever that means. (I’m also constantly spammed by @outlook emails claiming someone’s followed my blog. Why do more spammers visit my page than actual people? I get 20 spam comments per week. Oh well.) So there may be something to those invisible readers.

In an attempt to find some silver lining, this HAS restored decimal progress to my two week statistics snapshots. You may recall these appeared back during the climax of “Time & Tied” Book 2, in November 2015. It a funny quirk I’ve been able to track. You can manage 10.0 if you have an 8 or 9 view day; as soon as you get 10, the scale jumps away from decimals.

[caption id=“attachment_2162” align=“aligncenter” width=“620”] TWO AND A HALF YEARS LATER…[/caption]

I almost managed to get a full month of ALL less than 10 views. However, on May 15th, someone gave “Time & Tied” a try right up to Part 7, netting me 12 page views, which was my highest day. Zero view days were May 4, 17, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26 and 31. Across 268+ posts, which include a number of completed serials. (I still tweet out every update and post it to my FB page.)

Now, I should conclude this section by pointing out that I haven’t done much in the way of outside publicity this year. I’ve been pretty busy (see below). I did participate in the WFG “April Fool” swap again (I fear Rev Fitz isn’t building much traffic from me), “Serial Fiction Digest” gave me a feature shoutout at the end of March (before apparently going under), and I still get high referrers (ie- 5 per month) from Top Web Fiction, The Chaos Beast, and Redwood Crossing. So maybe that… kept things from being worse?

WHAT NOW?

I also hope to poke around more with “Time Untied” - yes, it really is still a thing, the 40k+ words from November have been revisited a few times since, and I still know what I want to do with it. It’s only that the first big Carrie-Heather scene has kind of blocked me, not to mention the stress of the teaching job constantly pulling me away.

In the meantime, I’ve contributed monthly comic columns to “The Time Travel Nexus” and participate in weekly webcomic chats on Discord, so you can find me there. Oh, and no 2018 coins yet this year. Interesting. I’m guessing I’ll start to see them soon?

As always, I hope you enjoyed the read. Feel free to add your voice below about anything you were wondering about, how much better/worse your site is doing, or just to offer encouragement. I’ll leave you with this AMV of a time travel/pop culture mix that you didn’t know you needed. (It makes more sense if you’ve seen the anime.)

Sorry everyone. No “Epsilon Project: Epsilon Delta” update today, or for the foreseeable future. After over 3 years of keeping to a schedule, I have finally met my match. I cannot teach a completely new course at school (namely Computer Science, a subject for which my qualifications are 10 years out of date) and hope to have any sort of other life. Which is a problem, because other things are happening in said life.

To cope, I started clawing back social events in late September. They’re pretty draining anyway. Then it was extra curricular efforts at school. More recently, earlier this week, I completely dropped social media in the hope that it might give me time to write an entry here. Nope. (Spent time dealing with the damn course.) I can’t keep up. We’ve reached the point of actual panic attacks at work. I’ll be seeing a doctor in the foreseeable future.

I tend to be “off” or “on” - I’m switching to “off”. Serial, off. Math comic, off. Recreational writing, off. Mental health thing. I’ve been here before, just not for this particular brand of misery. (I’m used to being down on myself, not down on my job.)

I don’t know how this will play out. I do know the following:

-If I end up with some sort of stress medical leave, the first thing I “resume” writing will be some reviews for the “Time Travel Nexus”. Because they’ve recently extended a branch, and that’s an incredible opportunity, and something I really want to do. It also gets me back into time travel, hence closer to “Time Untied”. So it’ll be a while for my personal blogs.

-I will post some sort of update here before the end of November. My HOPE is that it’s the next “Epsilon” entry, and if so, I’ll keep voting open for a couple weeks and gear back into it gradually. See, I know WHAT I want write I just have NO TIME. Also, everything’s a misery because of the millstone around my neck. I do really want “Epsilon” to be done before the annual horror that is late January though, so that I can start into pre-written material (blogged about here, voting still open). Again, we’ll see how this plays out.

-Related, if you follow my comic, the plan is to resume there only once “Epsilon” finishes here. Running the both of them at once was crazy, each of them takes me about 6-8 hours to do, effectively an entire Saturday every two weeks. I can’t spend my weekends doing things I enjoy any more. Not feasible.

-If I can, I’ll probably poke a stick at NaNoWriMo next month, using it as a vehicle for coaxing myself out of the deep well of computer-related anxiety I’ve found myself in. I knew last month I’d have no hope of 50k, report cards being a thing. I now wonder if 10k is even feasible. A draft of “Time Untied” probably won’t see the light of day before 2019 at this rate. But again, we’ll see.

-This is key: There’s another EXCELLENT interactive serial out there, “Redwood Crossing”. I’ve actually been able to almost keep up with reading it these past six weeks (to the exclusion of other blogs). Many cute girls. You should check that out in my absence, kaleidofish is good people. Voting’s still open to the end of Sunday.

-The other thing you can do if you like is keep tabs on this Facebook Author page I have for tracking purposes. To know when I’m back. Or find me as “mathtans” most everywhere on the web, since FB doesn’t like to update people on my existence.

Thanks for reading. To the four or five people who actually vote, my extra thanks. I hope you’ll be back in a month, or six weeks, or next year, or however long it takes to get joy back into my life. Peace out.

Everyone’s changing, I stay the same, I'm... A solo cello, outside a chorus. I’ve got a secret, it’s time for me to tell That you’ve been keeping me warm.

History repeats itself.

The short version: I’m going to shift “Epsilon” updates to being every two weeks. The long version is, as usual, rather more complicated. Feel free to read on, or not.

I’ll start by admitting that I’m not sure if this marks the beginning of the end. That’s certainly how it was with my personified math serial. The good news is, after 14 months of deep slumber, that did return from the ashes (as a webcomic). Similarly, “Time Untied” continues to percolate through my mind, and there is liable to be something there eventually. (Whether that story reaches completion is another issue entirely, as is how this site continues in the meantime.)

What kills me about this situation is just how similar it is back with the math serial. Then, Audrey was reading my backlogs just as everything imploded. This time, I’ve got Steve S following regularly, and people commenting, even as the situation seems to force me to scale back. I feel kind of bad about that.

Shouldn’t what little I have be enough? Why isn’t it enough? Maybe on some level I want to sabotage myself?

Thing is, I know my writing is niche. That solo cello, constantly playing its refrain of time travel, mathematics and multiverse insanity… in a fiction world of superheroes, YA romance and RPGs. I didn’t expect to gain an audience overnight. So why am I feeling the weight of it more now?

IN, STALLED

In the previous week, the week of June 25th, there was also a tie (2-2-1) on the Wednesday. (Also overall my lowest week for views so far in 2017.) I tweeted out, anyone want to break that. I got two more votes, resulting in a come-from-behind victory (2-2-3; in a way, that’s another reason I’m hesitant to break the tie myself). Despite that, this week, when I tweeted out the tie (1-1-1)… nothing.

I tossed out a Twitter poll a bit before midnight on Wednesday, asking should I wait a day? A week? (Give up entirely?) I got four responses, with the majority saying wait a day. So here we are, Friday noon, still a three way tie. I fail. Though, of course, there’s a bit more to it when placed in context.

Rewind to a year ago, “Epsilon Story3” routinely got between 3 and 5 votes. This year, we’d started “Epsilon Story4” with 5 to 7 votes. That felt like an improvement. So to drop back to 3 votes? And to stay there, despite me tweeting out “Hey, it’s a tie, yours is the swing vote to personally influence my writing!” and get nothing? That’s, frankly, kind of crushing.

The writing mind wonders. Maybe people went on vacation? Maybe the only three people voting now are the ones who had their choice picked last time? Maybe I can’t hold anyone’s interest week to week. Maybe people hate the characters. Maybe people are only humouring me for this story. Maybe I should quit while I’m ahead. One tries not to listen to certain inner voices but the spiral does go down.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

Despite that, somehow, I’m right back where I started a year ago. On this site, days with over 20 views across all 240+ posts is an oddity, not the norm. (There’s been seven in the last month.) Add to that how I can’t even push past 3 votes on a story which is meant to be based on audience votes. Despite k-fish linking back at me. (From a voting serial story about girl love, Redwood Crossing, check it out in the side links.)

[caption id=“attachment_1967” align=“aligncenter” width=“620”] JUNE INTO JULY 2017[/caption]

And the voting period is longer now than ever before! I picked Thursday morning figuring that gives me Thursday to consolidate and outline in my head, Friday to write (it takes me around 6 hours to crank out 2,000 words), and Saturday to edit. Last week, I pushed the envelope to do it sooner because Saturday was Canada Day, and I also wanted to submit a short story elsewhere by June 30th, and after all that effort…

We’re at the next Friday and I don’t even have the votes. So I’m writing this post instead. I should probably be marketing, but I’ve had 52 Weeks of fail there. Not only with this blog, but Wattpad too, and I just dropped in rank on RRL. My math comic, now in year six, also had two consecutive days of zero views last week.

I’m tired.

I’m teaching a new course in September.

Technically it’s not new, but they’ve redesigned the Ontario curriculum since I last taught Grade 10 computer science. That’s going to suck up more time during the summer, as I haven’t even done any computer programming in 10 years. Meaning I’m being pulled away by my job, and I don’t seem to have the foundation here to keep me from being uprooted.

I don’t know, maybe it’s good that I didn’t get the fourth vote on Thursday. Sending me back towards the thing I get paid for in money, rather than in enjoyment. Because being overlooked in a participation piece isn’t that enjoyable anyway. And I KNOW I’m niche, but to be back here, after a year of making the effort?

Still, as I said at the start, I’m not quitting, only scaling back to every other week. Hell, when I scaled UP in September, posting twice per week instead of once, my overall views WENT DOWN. (So does that mean by posting less often now, my views will go up?) I swear, anyone who says as long as you push out content regularly means you will eventually have an audience find you is a damn liar.

NOW WHAT

The plan had been to rerun an old story once we’d finished this “Epsilon” story entry, and that’s still the plan, it’ll just take longer to get there. Though that one might go weekly. Maybe I’ll put things to a vote. We’ll see. I really don’t know what September’s going to do to me.

Also, as long as I’m talking the audience (preaching to the choir), I noticed last week that someone’s still voting for T&T at Top Web Fiction. Thanks for that. I still get hits from there, which likely keeps us from plunging to zero views. (The person from Australia reading T&T Book 2 this past week also helped there.) Thanks also for those who have participated in weekly votes, who ReTweet, and for all comments over the past two months. I know I’m not a big part of your life out there, but I’m glad we can share that time together, no matter how brief. It makes me feel like it’s somehow worthwhile. :)

With no new fiction, I’ve leave you with this little AMV that Rose might enjoy watching, were Rose to know much of anything about anime.

Don’t tell me you have to go... In the heat of summer sunshine, I miss you, like nobody else. In the heat of summer sunshine, I thank you. I guess we’ll see where this goes.

As The Doctor so recently said, that is not the question. The question is… what is this NOT?

My hope is that this will not be boring.

PROJECT GENESIS

In one sense, this blog will be a companion piece to mathtans.blogspot.ca, my Personification of Mathematics web serial.  That was the beginning.  It ran for almost three years, to a very mixed reception.  However, for now I’d like to keep that site focused on those characters, or at least on mathematics.

In another sense, this blog will be a companion piece to mathiex.blogspot.ca, my Non-Fiction site for blogging about Writing and Education.  That was my second blog.  I continue to post there, where have included snippets of my fiction writing, primarily pieces of “Time Trippers”… which is my 1,000 page, four book story that had it’s genesis in the late 1990s. (Unpublished as of yet, not sure if I want to publish, and don’t really have the time to work out the logistics either way.) However, I don’t want to post a serial on that site, as it may get periodically interrupted by posts about real life.

So really, this blog will be it’s own beast.  The goal: “Creativity. Fantasy. Wordplay.” In the format of a serial, at least to start.

SPACE SEED

What will I publish here first? I considered a follow-up I’ve been working on to “Time Trippers”… but I haven’t gotten near as far with it as I might have hoped, and suspect the time travel aspect is going to make serial posts something of a logistical nightmare. I then considered beginning with my JulNoWriMo of 2012, “Balancing Act”, about a college girl who acts as a supernatural detective… but that wouldn’t be me writing, that would be me posting something already written. There is also no incentive for you to read it, unless you happen to know me, or the characters, and odds are, you don’t.

So I’m going to try something different.

I have created a number of different characters over the years, both for my stories and for role-play purposes.  What I did for “Personification of Mathematics” was come up with plots for the characters as driven by the underlying mathematics. What I plan to do here is come up with plots as driven by YOU.

I’ve got 12% of a plan. I’ll be relying on my readers and my Twitter followers (@mathtans) aka YOU for the rest.

RELIANT

Every Sunday, I’m going to write a segment of the story, and then offer up a couple choices for what can happen next. Whichever option gets the most votes in, let’s say 24 hours, that’s how the story will continue. (If no one votes, I’ll decide myself.) Don’t feel constrained by my options either - if you have a much better suggestion, feel free to put it in the comments! If there’s additional grassroots support (or no other votes), I’ll try to run with it. After writing the new segment, it will post the following Sunday, I will present a couple more options, and so on.

I have NO idea how well this will work, if at all, but I’m willing to give it a try if you are.

A few things to bear in mind.  First, in comments, keep the language clean.  I’m a mathematics teacher, my students may well end up reading this.  Related to that, I tend to be busy from September to June, so the writing segments are not likely to be terribly long, in particular during busy weeks.  Finally, part of the reason I’ll be using characters of my own creation is because I have a tendency to parody characters in existing media already.  But they are not based on anyone I know in real life, and I don’t want any future suggestions that involve real people.  Given that anything can happen, that might end badly.

With that said, here we go.  The first things I’m going to need are which of my characters to include, and what the evil villain is going to be up to.  Those postings will follow later tonight.