My New Fling

                                                                Ny New Fling

I have been ignoring my blog and I feel bad about it. Most people who blog just simply get tired of writing and they move on to other hobbies. Well, writing is my hobby and I have not gotten tired of it; it’s just that my blog is like a little sister, and now that I have a real girlfriend, I just don’t have the time.

My new girl friend demands much from me. I have to lavish attention on her and it leaves me too drained to keep my blog even remotely happy. My girl is top shelf, and it’s not that I don’t want to hang with my blog anymore, it’s just that the thrill is gone.

I mean, I have made it clear that I write for pleasure. But I also derive enjoyment when folks stop by and check out a particular piece, or maybe several. I occasionally check the stats and see how many people are reading what. It’s kind of egocentric, I admit, but I don’t get paid so I have to take what perks there are.

And that has worked fine for more than three years. I have posted six hundred and a bunch, and I have worked out more than one issue by writing about it. Heck, I wrote well over a hundred episodes on my mood spectrum disorder. That was quite therapeutic.

My world is different with my new girl, though. I mean, there was a time when I was pulling in 300 page-views on my blog and I was hop-scotching all over the country, chatting with my bloggie-buddies, but that tapered off. It requires time and energy and as long as my sister JT was still into it, so was I.

She gave me a lot of support back in the early days, when she was the only one who would comment on my posts. Now, however, having been at it for as long as I have, I find that my blog is nowhere as near exotic as my new girl. Instead of sitting around racking up thirty or forty page views on a good day, I am in the big leagues.

Writing for Around the Foghorn has been a completely different ballgame, if you’ll excuse the pun. I mean, I have a limited audience, but they are passionate about the Giants, just as I am, and they read my stuff. For a long while, I would get a hundred, two hundred, as many as five hundred page views for a timely piece. Once I hit 750.

Then a couple of weeks ago, just as the Giants’ season started to wind down, and the Giants got into the playoffs, my articles began skyrocketing into the stratosphere. I wrote a piece on the Giants being underdogs in the wild card game and it erupted, eventually topping off at 1,750. A couple of days later, I wrote one on rookie Joe Panik, and it didn’t stop until it hit more than 2,500 views. Then yesterday, a piece I wrote on Pablo Sandoval, shot up to 3,700, and it’s still climbing.

My top view-getting piece on my blog is The Only Scoreboard the Matters” and has gotten to 1,400 views, but it’s taken a year and a half to get there. Not like watching a piece get 500 hits in an hour. That is a rush.

I emailed my editor Timmy, a nineteen-year-old lad who lives in Ireland and asked him what was up. I said it felt as though I were writing the same stuff as always, except now I was getting all of these views. He told me that my stuff was being featured on “Bay Area Bleacher Report” which posts articles that have merit for fans to have easy access to.

Bleacher Report! Beyond my wildest expectations. Timmy also told me that I had netted over 10,000 views in the past five days and that as long as I kept writing strongly opinionated pieces in the third person, the editors at Bleacher Report would continue to feature my stuff.

So here I am, feeling guilty for ignoring my little sister, in favor of my publicity-seeking girlfriend. I guess the silver lining is that instead of costing me money, my girl could lead to me actually earning money.

They do pay sportswriters to write about baseball teams and I write about the Giants.

Stay tuned.