Two months at GHG

When I was younger, I remember my dad telling me, “Just you wait… soon you’ll be looking at your life in terms of decades instead of years.”  Although great things have happened to me in my thirties — I got married to the love of my life, adopted a beautiful Rottweiler, bought and sold two homes, and lived in three states — they were certainly a blur. Some things are humorously coincidental, like the fact that exactly ten years ago, I was in a similar situation: between jobs, living at home, catching up on games, and thinking a lot about the future.

And here I am, already two months into writing this little blog of mine. It’s been a great experience so far, and it’s cool to see how it’s growing.

20140616_statsSince last month, I’ve added 22,798 words in 25 posts, for an average of 911.56 words per post. Some entries have definitely been longer than others, but I’ve tried my best to maintain some semblance of sanity with their length. Total content has increased by 61.72% over the past month.

I’m not sure how effective subscriptions are these days since most folks stay connected to website content via news aggregators and social media, but I saw an increase of 62.5% from 3 to 8. Not all that significant, but something to point out nonetheless.

Top keywords continue to be consistent from last month: game(s), like, time, good, just, and really. I just really like spending time with good games.

An all-time total of 1,146 views and 52 comments also seems low, but I haven’t done much to promote the blog. I might start looking at ways to broaden my audience soon, but I’ve wanted to stay focused on content up to this point.

Anyway, thanks again for visiting and reading GHG, as well as for the support you’ve shown on the various social media sites. The journey has just begun!

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GHG’s 1-month anniversary

As with any new goal, hitting the 1-month mark is a good feeling. It makes getting to future milestones — 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, even 5 years — that much more achievable. When I set out to create this blog, I made a promise to myself that I would write for it every day, unless something absolutely prevented me from doing so. Even if nobody saw it, even if a post could be read out loud in one breath, at least I would know that I did what I set out to do.

Although I mentioned the other day that I was not a fan of statistics in college, I do like numbers and the stories they can tell. Via Word Stats, seeing the “14,139” total words written over the past month is cool. Several more months of this, and I’ll have enough words for a book or a few screenplays. Sometimes I think I should be putting my time into that sort of writing, but the way I see it, keeping at this blog could evolve into something bigger. Who knows? Whatever the future may hold, games are at the core of who I am and what I’ve done throughout most of my career, so it’s exciting to be putting my energy into something I love again.

The top 5 keywords for GHG are: game(s), like, time, overall, and great. It comes as no surprise that I use the words “game” and “games” too much in my posts, and I do struggle with that! It seems redundant since this is a gaming blog, but it tends to get typed a lot, so I’ll have to keep a closer eye there. Same goes for the others. I read everything out loud before publishing to help with clarity, flow, and readability, and some days are more successful than others. Coffee and sleep do make a big difference. Looking back on some of my posts makes me cringe, but I see those as valuable lessons on what to avoid for future updates.

In closing, thanks for visiting and reading GHG, as well as for the support you’ve shown on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. You can find and follow me on any of those by clicking on the icons in the upper-right corner of the site.

Here’s to month 2!

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