Bells and Whistles

There's no end to the gizmos you can put on your blog. If you've prowled around here any time in the past week or so, you've probably seen my ClustrMap which shows where people are accessing the blog from. If you click on it and make it bigger, you can see the general area more clearly (otherwise the US is beginning to look very much like a blob of strawberry jelly) and if, once you get the bigger map, you click on the link beside Navigation, where it says "smaller clusters" it gets even more specific. Kind of fun to see where the dots turn up. Got friends in Mongolia or Tierra del Fuego or Hawaii? Tell 'em to stop by. I'd love to fill the world with dots!

On the writing front, I discovered a 'word meter' which will display for all the world to see how many words I've got toward my current work in progress. So I decided it might be fun -- and challenging -- to put it up there so I can log Spence's total number of words. Not sure how often I'll update it, especially if it's going backwards, but I'll give it a shot.

There is, of course, no way to tell if those words will be the actual words I'll use in the book. The total of words I've actually written on Spence, even as he is now, is probably well over 10,000. But only a little more than half were "keepers." So a word count is nice, but it doesn't really tell the whole story.

That's up to me -- and Spence.