Toreas Blog

I actually missed the 1000 readers point by a bit. Currently the story has slightly more than 1100 readers and it’s growing rapidly.

So first and foremost: Thank you.

I write this story for my own enjoyment as well as an experiment in storytelling and apparently it appealed to a lot of other people as well. To blatantly copy my own homepage:

The story currently is 32,410 words long, spans 13 chapters and if it was printed, it would be 137 pages long.

That right there is already pretty good. I have currently about twice that much written down (not all connected together) and waiting for editing. And all of that taken together, about 25 times (or maybe even more) as much worth of stories in my head.

Yes Toreas is going to be long. Yes there is a lot to come. And no, not all and everything is about Eric, Zara, Shimon and Taji’ra. I wont even say if one or all survive till the end of the story. That I can be mean, I think I already established, so no character is safe, ever.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I do writing it and that you come back, read more and tell everyone you know about it. And pineapples will be eaten.

And here goes chapter 12 of Toreas. Eric get’s to meet the King and get his ‘reward’.

Now this has been one of those hate chapters. I love it, for the story it tells, but I had to tinker on it forever to get it into this shape. It’s not as perfect as I wanted it to be, but it’s as close to it as I could make it. For chapter 13 I’m being mean again. Well, meaner.

I decided to actually use twitter more in a fashion that it was meant to be used. The blog is for all those things I want to say in more than 140 characters or that have a certain significance to them none the less. Twitter is more fleeting and up to the minute. So for example I will post progress on twitter, when I finish a write down of a chapter, make progress on something else, have writers block or whatever else comes my way in terms of Toreas.

That way the blog is a cleaner place where you can find the things most dear to me and if you are so inclined, keep closer to the pulse of Toreas by watching the twitter status run along. And of course for your easy viewing pleasure, the blog also shows you the latest status updates on the right hand side.

Google was kind enough to send along a coupon for around $100 in AdWords money. AdWords is what they call their money maker. In short, you pay them and they display your ad everywhere where people have signed up for their AdSense product. You can specify by keywords and so get a more targeted way of having your ad displayed.

So I set up the account, selected keywords and setup an ad. Pretty early on I discovered that the Toreas page has a big flaw. I was leading people to the homepage and they were lost there. Few found their way to the introduction from there. Even fewer kept reading on. So I went and changed that to show them directly to Chapter 1. Now suddenly a lot more staid and started reading. They even went on and started reading chapter 2 and 3.

Currently this experiment brings in about 50 new readers a day and so far quiet a few have returned for more. I might keep this up at a later date if it keeps on performing this well.

This one month has been interesting but it also has limitations. Although I have upped the limits pretty high, the limits were rarely reached. I believe you could get a lot of visitors through this program, but now, after I stopped it for all but some selected search keywords, I will see how many of these I will retain over the next month.

Things went faster than anticipated and here comes chapter 11 already. The conclusion of Zara’s and Eric’s rather unexpected and uncomfortable swimming excursion.

Chapter 12 is almost ready as well, but I want to read it over twice more as it is a pivotal moment in the story. Meanwhile I keep writing chapter 13, which will introduce you to the last of the 3 main characters for at least the first large part of the story.