A Disclaimer

Before we left for our year in Turkey (a result of my wife landing a Fulbright Grant to further her archaeological research) I was asked by a few friends whether I planned to keep a blog of the experience. At the time, my unspoken answer was always no, for a whole host of reasons. First and foremost, I'm here to work on a novel and need to keep my distractions to a minimum, especially those that might sap my willingness to sit for one moment more in this uncomfortable chair and stare at this computer screen. On the one hand, I know damn well that every writer of every stripe is now expected to build an online presence and market themselves ad nauseum. On the other, I've always found blogs to be terribly self-indulgent (especially my own) and in any case, a travel blog would only tangentially relate to my novel in progress or the other books and stories I've published. I already keep a private travel journal—always have. Why make it public?

 Another thing holding me back was my abominable track record. I've started at least four other blogs in the past. Two have already been voluntarily expunged from the public record: a scatterbrained place to store what limited DIY knowledge I have acquired just being the cheap, foolhardy bastard that I am, and a passably enjoyable channeling of my daughters' thoughts on the twenty days we spent travelling Western Turkey and living in an excavation house in 2011. (My ever-respectful wife, and the whole reason we were there in the first place, asked me to delete the latter for fear it might supplant more serious, less irreverent websites about said excavation in Google searches. I only discovered after the fact that I could, at least in theory, hide a blog from Google's all-seeing eyes.)

The other two are still out there, flapping in the wind. What We Fear began as Thirty Days of Night(mares)—a self-indulgent account of my self-indulgent experiment in October of 2008 to watch thirty horror films in thirty days, with breathless updates on my sanity and abbreviated reviews of each. I meant it to be finite (and facetious) from the outset, but briefly resurrected it three years later as a general consideration of all the many things that frighten people. At its peak, I think it had four subscribers. That well ran dry, or I lost the energy to lift the bucket, and I abandoned it. Imagine my surprise when I logged into its user panel just yesterday and discovered it had over 7,000 unique visitors. A paltry number, as these things go, but enough to make me wonder whether I had underestimated the blog, if not as a marketing tool then as the perfect place to indulge my self-indulgence.

My one current "blog" is the only thing besides my children, my wife, my fiction, my homebrew, my old diesel pickup, my garden, and my work shed that gets any attention from me these days. And it falls at the very end of that list. Nonetheless, the growing collection of oddities and curiosities that I curate at Wondercabinet.net continues to plug along, pulling in between 1000 and 2000 unique visitors every month. Earlier this year it attracted a record 14,000 visitors in one day, thanks to a chance mention on reddit. (Are you listening agents? Are you counting those ducats?) Compared to Grumpy Cat or the million other memes-of-the-week that number is still absolute peanuts, but hey it's a start, right? I think the reason Wondercabinet has succeeded, at least on a modest level, while the others have failed is that it isn't a blog at all. Not in the usual sense. Its author is more or less invisible and the content does all the talking. Twisted, often creepy content, yes, but at least it's something beyond one person's internal monologue.

All of which is a long winded disclaimer and non-explanation for why I decided to go ahead and do another Turkey blog after all. What changed my mind? I'm not sure, exactly. Maybe I need something that isn't so weighted down with lofty expectations. Maybe I just want to share our experiences with family and friends. Sometimes thing really are that simple.

The following entries will be transcribed more less verbatim from my travel journal. They will likely be sporadic. They will certainly be purple and over earnest. My style leans that way anyway, but positively falls head first into a vat of overheated purple goo when I stop editing and let myself go. You've been warned. Abandon snark all ye who enter here.