Saturday, October 2, 2010

It's a Small World

I've just been checking my blog stats and among other things it shows where my blog visitors come from. I was surprised to see that I have visitors from both Russia and Egypt. Either this is wonderful and it means my readership is spreading throughout the world, OR it means someone in Russia is looking for a way to hack/spam/take over my blog and someone in Egypt is similarly looking for a way to infiltrate my blog with terror messages.

Let's hope the former! I'm amazed at how small the world has become. When I ran a contest on a website last year the prize for the entries that had traveled the most miles went to South Africa, followed by Finland. I certainly have friends from all over the world on Facebook. Every now and then I'm reading through Facebook news and a chat button will click on and I find myself chatting with someone from Africa or Australia. How cool is this? Perhaps Facebook will actually achieve what everyone else has tried to do--bring about world peace and understanding!

Today I go literary... I'm reading at Litquake, which is a week long festival of the written word in San Francisco. I'm reading at a theater with fellow crime writers Barry Eisler, Sophie Littlefield and one more, but we follow a group of poets and after us a group of memoirs. I'm going first, thanks to beginning with B,so I'm just hoping that the poet before me hasn't written a long poem about the death of a butterfly or the end of the world, because I intend to make people laugh with an excerpt from Royal Blood.

4 comments:

  1. Rhys, I have the same concerns when I see the countries of visitors to my blog and know that person has never left a comment. I tend to change my password a lot, just in case.

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  2. I'm really quite excited to have a chance to meet you. I've only just come across your 'Royal Spyness' books and after finishing the most recent, decided to look you up on the internet. As I live in the Bay Area, I'm hoping to make it to one of your appearances.

    Thanks for a lovely time with Royal Spyness. I look forward to more!

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  3. I look forward to meeting you--I still have a few apperaances planned for this book, and I'm often at libraries etc around the Bay.

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  4. Poets seem to need rules so things don't get out of order or too boring. I belong to 2 poetry workshops and one has the rule of nature having to be somewhere in the poem, it meets tonight and I have a rough draft so far. Hearing poetry read by the author or someone who cares gives a new layer to the power of poetry to reach across barriers and form new alliances by the senses and whistfulness for the past. I know you had a good time.

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