Ransomology Weekly Newsletter No. 2
Jan 20, 2015

As announced last week, the Ransomology About page needs work. Foolishly, I sought input from some seasoned bloggers before writing About versions 1 to 97, and was given the dubious advice that no matter what happens, it must be short. Well intentioned I’m sure, but it turns out that this is total crap. It doesn’t have to be short at all – what it has to be good!

It only has to be short if it’s so boring that no one wants to read past the first sentence. If it’s good, if it’s funny, people will read it. If it’s so boring that it makes people’s eyeballs glaze over and spurt out blood, it doesn’t matter how short it is, no one’s gonna read it; or if they do, it will only be so they can say “PFftttt”, before getting the hell outta there. Besides, if it’s funny and good and even a bit special and they still can’t be assed reading it because it’s too looooong, then they’re hardly going to be spending the time necessary to read my actual blog posts are they? Let alone the footnotes, which a small but vocal minority of my readers are telling me I absolutely positively have to quit it with immediately…or sooner if possible.

One of the funniest About pages I’ve read is on a site called Becky Says Things. That shit is funny. And it’s longish, but it does break up the words with some hilarious stick figure drawings. Alright, it’s not really longish, it’s about 4 paragraphs, but that’s way longer than the 2 sentences I’ve been told to condense mine down to. Or this one from She’s a Maineiac. Now that’s long. Even I haven’t read the whole thing yet. But I’m working here!, not just surfing around and reading. And it’s funny! And interesting. So, not all good About pages are short.

I think my advisors are thinking of a business blog as opposed to a creative writing blog. If you’re claiming to be a creative writer, and a humourist, you have to show that you can be both creative and funny with your About page right? You can’t just bang in one line that says: “I write funny – you read, say haha”.

So what I’m going to do is write an article about the trials of writing an About page for a creative writer’s blog. When that’s done, I hope to be able to put what I’ve learned into practice and finally write my own About page.

I other exciting news, the Facebook page managers of Introverts are Awesome have said that they’ll share my latest article, Steve’s Masochistic Coffee Quitting Experiment Day 26 – An Introvert’s Tale. They have 97 thousand followers. Given what I’ve learned about blog readers referred by Facebook, i.e. that they are about as likely to follow the blog they’re reading as I am to be killed by a falling coconut, I ought to get…i dunno, 3 followers out of that at least.