Well, dear readers, some people keep mentioning substacks and I had no idea what the HELL they were talking about. “On my substack,” they’d say and I thought that maybe they were talking about bad pancakes. For a time, I thought it had something to do with Reddit, but I don’t understand Reddit at all. But no, substack is rather like this here site. You can write notes like these here notes and reach your audience and engage with your audience and even have discussions with your audience. You know, kind of like we’ve been doing for almost twenty-five YEARS now. I’ve always felt we were influencers – now we know we are. We were a substack before that word ever existed. We stacked our subs on a daily basis (I like the spicy Eyetalian myself), we engaged from the beginning, we reached our audience from day one, and given recent visits here, I’d say we have become very popular with the populace, unless those 20,000 GUESTS are bots? I suppose that’s possible, but why would bots come here. We don’t need no stinking bots. I went and looked at our recent stats and last month our page views were 13,000,000 and change, which was more than the entire page view count for 2023 – in one MONTH. Last year, we had 44-million page views – actually, pretty close to 45 million. In the first three days of June, we’ve already had 6 million page views. Substack, my ASS. We are the STACK right here and there’s nothing sub about us. Stats don’t lie. No matter who these 26,000 GUESTS might be (we had that many two days ago), I’m happy they’re here and I hope they’re getting some enjoyment out of our discussion board. Fun facts. But not as interesting as the Muse Margaret telephonic call yesterday morning at eight-thirty, just before I left. She read the forty-eight pages and mostly loved them, but I could tell that at least a couple of things didn’t work for her, and I pretty much knew what one of them was, because I was struggling so much when I wrote it. Her problems were a bit of confusion on page one – she thought I should write one paragraph before the one I start with and boy was she right about that. I’d written the opening paragraph almost a year ago, just to get it down, but it didn’t really start the book properly. Her other problem was one of tone and where things went for about two pages. I wrote down the comments and told her I’d revise that stuff and send it to her in the afternoon.
Then I went and had breakfast, then stopped at the mail place, then went to Gelson’s and got some of my creamy tomato soup. Whilst sitting in the car, I wrote an e-mail to myself with a rough new opening paragraph – just an idea of what it should be. Then I came home and wrote the new opening paragraph – very different from the rough – smoother and more concise. Then I removed about three paragraphs, and a few stray lines here and there and that really helped the section I’d struggled with. Suddenly, having done those edits, the tone was right. I sent it to her and she called me an hour or so later and she loved the new opening paragraph, and said the other stuff was now just right and she loved it all so far. So, all that was very helpful.
Since I’d only gotten about five hours of sleep, I dozed off for a while, then had some telephonic conversations, but didn’t make the telephonic calls I needed to make because the time just got away from me. I heated up the soup and had that, then got two tacos from the nearby Mexican jernt I like. They arrived very quickly and were very good. I got the hard drive back with the fixed Drat! Video. The fixes were basically fine, although he clipped one word but that wasn’t too bothersome. I then got it uploaded to YouTube but as a private video. That took a long time because the file was over twenty-four gigs. It’s not viewable by the general public and won’t be. Then I watched the PBS showing of Kiss Me, Kate from London and I really did not care for it at all. While I enjoyed some of Bartlett Sher’s South Pacific revival (but not all), I hated his My Fair Lady production, and I saw enough of his Fiddler on the Roof to know I would have hated that. The Kiss Me, Kate was just so full of itself and so relentlessly busy – there must have been over a thousand light cues – I hate the way shows are lit today, as if the lighting designers are screaming LOOK AT ME! The best lighting designers, like Tharon Musser, lit the show subtly and beautifully. I can only imagine what today’s designers would do with A Chorus Line today, or even Dreamgirls. This changing the lights every three seconds in a musical number is ridiculous – if the material is good, you don’t need to do that – it’s like putting a cattle prod under the audience and is as subtle as a brick. The guy playing Fred couldn’t really sing the role – his acting was okay. Stephanie Block seemed to be trying too hard. And the choreography was more like watching a gym class than dancing. Them’s my two centimes. I’m sure lots enjoyed it and that’s fine by me.
After that, I dozed off again, and here we are.
Today, I’ll be up when I’m up, I’ll do whatever needs doing, then at noon-thirty I’m getting a needed haircut with a new gal doing those honors – not too far from here – then I’ll probably pick something up on the way home rather than ordering in, I’ll eat, I’ll make telephonic calls, I’ll definitely write, and then I can watch, listen, and relax.
Tomorrow is more of the same, I have a lunch meeting on Friday, and I’ll try to write some on the weekend, and I may have to see a play, although I may do that the following week.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up when I’m up, do whatever needs doing, get a haircut, pick up something to eat, make telephonic calls, write, and watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s Ask BK Day, the day in which you get to ask me or any dear reader any old question you like and we get to give any old answer we like. So, let’s have loads of lovely questions and loads of lovely answers and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy to have learned what a substack is and how we prefigured it by almost twenty-five years.