January on the Crooked Road

In case you missed them, here are the top 5 posts in January:

Sólstafir at KEXP A testament to SEO in blog titles I guess. The top post of the month wasn’t even a “written” post. I just embedded a video of my favorite band playing an in-studio on my favorite radio station. I only discovered when putting this post together that I didn’t even embed the video properly. Hopefully it’s displaying properly now, if you feel like clicking through.

Guardians of the Galaxy for the Win I’d like to think this means it’s okay if I write about my family, but I think it too speaks to the power of including popular culture refences in your blog titles.

A History of my Life in 10 Songs As a reader, I hate listicles. As a freelance writer, I always try to angle for a more solid feature. Then this one time, I posted a list on my blog and it was the third most popular post for a month. Can I pretend it’s because it’s about music and does not mean people like lists?

Stalking Asgeir Trausti A long time ago, I interviewed Asgeir Trausti for Three Imaginary Girls. I think I was the second person to do so in English (after KEXP, of course). I wonder if that would give me an in to interview him again about his personal life. It would certainly put my stats through the roof.

Former Oscar I loved the way this photo taken in my kitchen showed the cat blocking the computer, the baby reaching for the cat’s tail, and the coffee pot and cold medicine in the background. To me, it summarized family life despite lacking any human faces. I schedule my Sunday photo posts a month in advance. It was a complete coincidence that I scheduled the picture of my late cat, Oscar, for the same week as the Oscars. Pop culture references for the win. Sheesh.

Top Countries:

There’s been a shift since the last time I looked. In January, Crooked Road readers came from

• United States
• Australia
• Germany

Hello, and welcome to the Aussies and Germans! Let me know what you like and I’ll try to post more of it.

How did you get here? Mostly the usual social media suspects, but a few people seem to have been on the Iceland Writers Retreat website and clicked through to my posts about it. If those people are still on the fence about attending – Barbara Kingsolver and Sjón, you guys! GO! You won’t regret it. Even if you go and it gives you the courage to quit your day job and write full time, so you can’t afford to go again the next year. You won’t regret it. I don’t.

The top search terms not hidden by Google were:

• gyda angist gummi solstafir
• asgeir girlfriend / who is asgeir girlfriend
• gemma alexander interview gummi
• joe duplantier veg
• pnb director’s choice

There wasn’t much in the list of search terms to make me say wtf? But I don’t know what this means:

• there’s no place like d wing alexander

Featured Follower:

I’m such an introvert, I can’t even blog if I think about who might be reading or what they might think about it. So I don’t usually do any of that blogger community stuff. But that’s lame, so I’ll try to be more social in 2015. For the first time, I’ve looked at the part of my stats page that shows who follows me. (I’m pretty sure it only includes other bloggers who have followed my page using the WordPress Reader. If you subscribe by email, I think you stay anonymous.)

Anyway, the first person who followed Crooked Road in 2015 is a creative writer named Elan Mudrow. Her blog consists of haunting black and white images accompanied by poetry and lyrical works of flash fiction. It has a very definite aesthetic that I find quite appealing. For some reason, I am reminded of Opal Whiteley.

I think it’s quite an interesting page, so you might, too. Why don’t you head on over to check out Elan Mudrow’s ridges of intertextuallity?