The Surprise Supporter

It should be perfectly obvious to most people by now that I don't write this blog to conquer the literary world. Way back in the very beginning, I said something like 'There will be rants, there will be bitching. Come along for the ride if you like and let's see what happens.'

The thing is, I'm - and I'm about to lay a technical PR industry phrase on your asses, to hold onto something - entirely bollock useless at promoting what I write. I haven't updated my website for months on end, which means there's a pile of geeky articles probably as tall as I am that need to go on, and that probably never achieved their full potential in terms of eyeballs and brand-growth. Likewise, I tend to only tag a small handful of people into entries of this blog that I'm fairly confident will read and enjoy them, or at least read them to know what the hell I've been upto on any given day, shoudl they want to catch up.

So it was a bit of a mystery to me, a couple of weeks ago when a pal of mine from waaaaaay back - we're talking first year of comprehensive school, when both of us had hair and I had a different surname altogether - suggested to me via Facebook that I should put the first year of the blog together as an e-book, and fling it out into the wilds of Amazon, to at least allow me to say I had something out there.

I'll be honest, the idea was mostly intriguing because I've done what most people would think of as 'the hard bit' - the blogs are written for conspicuously longer than that first, successful year.

Naturally though, I've taken every opportunity in the meantime not to take the idea seriously because - well, again, bollock useless at taking myself seriously.

Imagine my surprise then to get a message out of the blue late last night from someone I didn't know, a friend of Tania, the Starbucker who I promise I'll stop calling the Christmas Elf any minute now, honestly. This friend was enormously complimentary, and, bless her, appears to have read the whole freaking thing. A full year of every-day entries, followed by four years of more sporadic entries, false starts, restarts and fundamental failures. I'm not even sure I've read the whole frekaing thing, because as you can probably tell, most of it is entirely stream of consciousness.

Won't share her actual review as I've somehow managed to get to nearly 8pm today without having the forethought to ask her if I could (I mentioned the bollock useless thing, right?), but suffice it to say, it was more than enough to put a spring in my step, both in terms of pushing on with this attempt to Disappear again and in the potential idea of packaging up the blog entries as an actual book-like...thing. Ha - Year 1: The Disappearing Man. Years 2-4 - The Reappearing Man. Year 5, goddammit, the Return of the Disappearing Man!

Just a lovely moment in life, to get a note through from someone who's actually read the thing and found some worth in it.

Right - enough sentiment. There are bikes to jump on and sweat to be shed. Catch you tomorrow, Disappearers.