Comic Cuts

I've spent most of the week trying to put a book together in double-quick time. I won't jinx it by saying what it is but I think you'll like it. I'll say more when it's actually in the bag.

One of the reasons I wanted to take a couple of days off was the perform a little maintenance, things like backing up Bear Alley just in case something goes horribly wrong. It's the kind of thing that's easy to let slide (and the fact that I'd not done any backing up since last September probably tells you that I'm a bit lax when it comes to things like that).

It also gave me a chance to cobble together some statistics about the site. I've now used 96% of my allotted space. A lot of that, of course, is because Bear Alley is fairly picture heavy. As I don't want to strip out all the images, it looks like I'm going to have to take the plunge and pay for some extra space. If anyone cares to help out, I've added a little PayPal donation button down there in the right-hand column.

There were 137,250 words written for Bear Alley in the six months between October 2008 and March 2009 bringing the grand total to something like 675,000 words. That's not a wholly accurate figure because there's some repetition (the recently released and upcoming books listings) but it's still a lot of words in two-and-a-half years. This is a good opportunity for me to thank the people who have been good enough to donate some of their words to BA, especially Tony Woolrich, Gordon Howsden and Jeremy Briggs who have been welcome regulars.

Last October, Bear Alley was receiving something like 460 visitors a day; this peaked in December with over 800 visitors per day, and the March average isn't far below that at 700 visitors a day. I'm not going to be challenging Google as the most visited website just yet but that's still a lot of people on a daily basis.

I hope you're all enjoying "Eagles Over the Western Front". I'll have more episodes for you shortly so you'll get the chance to see how Harry Hawkes' adventures in the Royal Flying Corps continue. Hopefully things will settle down a little next week and I'll be able to post more regularly.