A Splintered Mind

Entry 18 – 11:46 PM: Just a quick update before I head off to bed. Finally, sickness left me so that I could attend Life, the Universe & Everything . It’s an academic symposium on science fiction & fantasy held every year in Provo, Utah. I used to help run it when I attended BYU. There isn’t anything else quite like it out there. I missed yesterday’s programming (economics of the undead and a discussion on folklore with Jessica Day George and Dene Lowe , to name a few), and I worried that I simply wouldn’t be able to shake off this virus. In a fit of unusual slumber, however, I retired to bed at 7:50pm and woke up refreshed early this morning. Well, refreshed sometime after 1:30am, then I was up all night, insomniac that I am, but refreshed I was, and off to the con I stumbled! I was delighted to bump into old friends from college. Life takes us in so many varied directions, it’s hard to keep track of everybody. Sometimes we let friendships go....

Sometime before midnight on January 31st, my blog crossed a threshold that I’ve been waiting for a long time to see. A Splintered Mind has hit 500,000 unique visitors. Considering the blog just had it’s twelfth birthday on January 2nd, this seems a fitting month to achieve such a milestone. Thank you, one and all, for your support over the past twelve years. I’ve grown so much as a person and as a writer. In fact, we’ve come so far together since the days years ago when I would blog about my wet socks, and you could leave comments—back before my blog template became damaged beyond repair. Maybe that’s a bad example. My socks are still a water magnet. It’s so irritating. I change them almost twice a day. I just stepped in a puddle a few minutes ago. Why was water waiting to lovingly soak my socks in that particular corner? How did the water get there? Why didn’t anybody else step in it? And why am I talking about wet socks, anyway? I didn...