One More Good Adventure

Patience is a virtue?

Why can’t “Hurry the hell up” be a virtue?

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 29,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 153 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 347 posts. There were 271 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 147mb. That’s about 5 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was August 1st with 210 views. The most popular post that day was A Good Day’s Sail.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were 70point8percent.blogspot.com, chiriquichatter.net, WordPress Dashboard, en.wordpress.com, and joycepa.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for shanty boat, floating homes, shanty boats, houseboat, and sailing around the world.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

A Good Day’s Sail July 2009

Houseboat vs Shanty Boat vs Floating Home April 2009

Houseboat/Shantyboat Updated April 2009
3 comments

America’s Cup Gets New Look January 2010
1 comment

Classic Dutch Sailboat November 2009

It’s hard to imagine how many Kindle ebook readers were left under Christmas trees this year though I’m sure a little research could find the number. Confirmed Luddite and practicing contrarian that I am, I don’t have one or any of the others like the iPad, etc. And I’m probably not going to ever get one, either. I’m not a gadget fan and I laugh (HAH!) at the idiots that stay up all night in the freezing cold to be the first in line to get the newest digital toy to hit the market.

I’ve been quite content with listening to my books from Audible.com. Unfortunately there are several authors I enjoy whose books are available from that source with narrators I just can’t listen to. I’ve downloaded a bunch of books from the Gutenberg Project and have enjoyed them immensely recently having read Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” which I highly recommend.

Naturally the availability of English language books is limited here in Panama though there’s a very good second-hand bookstore, The Bookmark, in Dolega and you can special order new releases and wait for their arrival.

Now, I’m not saying the Kindle is a bad thing. In fact in a lot of ways I think their wonderful and I hope millions of people buy them because I plan on releasing my book in digital form and look forward to people actually buying it through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. But, again, I’m not going to buy one myself.

However, I DO want to be able to read some of my favorite authors and so I downloaded a FREE program called Kindle for PC. It emulates the hand-held Kindle with all the features of the real thing. I’m not sure I’d want to read books sitting at a desk staring at the monitor of a desk top computer, but it’s not too bad doing it on my notebook. I can take it outside and sit on the porch and read, but, I grant you, it’s got to be a lot bulkier than the Kindle and though my notebook has pretty good battery life I bet it can’t compare with a dedicated ebook reader. I downloaded a couple of novels that I paid for and several free books from Amazon and was rather dazzled by how fast they were delivered. Almost instantaneous. So, now I have another way of wasting time when I should be doing something productive.

If you’re like me you can download Kindle for PC here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311

And if you’re a Mac user you can do the same thing here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_mac_mkt_lnd?docId=1000464931

People who visit this blog regularly have probably noticed that I haven’t posted since Christmas. There’s a reason, of course, and it has nothing to do with health, thank goodness. No, and while one of the basic mottos I follow is: Procrastinate NOW! That’s not it, either. I’ve been working to fill an old prophesy and a promise to myself. Let me explain.

Back in ’65 when I was going to college in Missouri I was very good friends with my English professor and his family and was one of his star students in his writing classes. One of those was a play writing class where each of us had to write a one-act play. These were later staged at the school. My play was entered in a contest among colleges in Missouri, Iowa and Illinois and my play took second place. Of all those plays submitted, however, mine was the only one that went live again, this time performed at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois.

Sometime during that year the author Erskine Caldwell who wrote the infamous Tobacco Road came to give a lecture at the school. The professor, the late Joel Climenhaga, invited me, and I believe my good friend, Dennis, to dinner to meet Mr. Caldwell. Somewhere towards the bottom of the evening’s second bottle of Jim Beam Joel made the pronouncement to Caldwell that, “of all the students I’ve taught if one of them ever writes a book it will undoubtedly be Philbrick, here.”

People who go to sea are usually great readers. There’s damned little else to do between watches. I’ve been a reader all my life and worked for a number of years earning a living putting words to paper. I wrote numerous articles that were published in national magazines, none of which any of you have ever read, I’m sure. They weren’t big name magazines but what I earned from them helped pay the rent. I even wrote a novel once that no one wanted to buy but it did garner several hand-written rejection letters from publishers but most were simple printed-form “no thanks” rejections.
When I started working on boats I stopped writing. I kept a journal through the years, though, but that was about it except for my blogging.

Books and articles about writing advise prospective authors to “write what you know.” This is, in my opinion, pretty much bullshit. Admittedly authors like James Lee Burke “knows” about south Louisiana and writes about it so beautifully I can “see” those places he writes about because I’ve been there. Carl Hiassen and Tim Dorsey “know” that Florida is inhabited by one of the largest collection of loonies in the world and capture them well in their books. But what the hell does Rowling “know” about wizards or Rice “know” about vampires? I think a better admonition would be “write a book you’d want to read.”

There has been a book like that festering in the few functioning brain cells I have left and when I moved to Panama I started working on just such a book. It’s sort of like the narrator of the story was “channeling” through me and then for a couple of months the bastard clammed up. I couldn’t get him to say a damn word. Recently, though, I haven’t been able to get him to shut up. So that’s what I’ve been doing instead of posting lately.

The book’s time line is broken into three distinct segments. I’ve completed the first and am into the second part now. With the development of ebooks through such outlets as Amazon, Apple store and others I won’t be going through the regular old-style form of book publishing but will be going the developing “indie author” route. I’ll let you know when I get it done.