#ForestMayhem – what happened next!

Well, there are a LOT of people I need to thank!

If you want the full back story then you can find it here but the summary is this: to make up for the fact that I failed to upload the 500 word story, Forest Mayhem,  that my 10 year old daughter spent hours lovingly creating, I posted it on my blog. I also put out a plea on social media for people to read it, pass it on and maybe comment on what they liked about her writing.

The results were fantastic, thanks to the generosity of people in my immediate network and beyond. She’s absolutely thrilled that so many people so has never heard of cared enough to read and share her story. She spent ages carefully reading the comments some of you left her.

The numbers

I’m not fully up to speed with Google Analytics but, taken with a pinch of salt, these are some of the important numbers about how many people viewed the page. It was posted about 10pm on the 26th Feb.

188 pageviews makes this the most viewed page on my blog. My daughter is understandably delighted and I now have a target to beat.

The average time on page of 6 mins 37 seconds is also really good!

Drilling down she can also see that Google has recorded the cities that people viewing the pages were sitting in. They include many close to home but also as far away as Melbourne, Hanoi, Bordeaux and Hemel Hempstead.

The comments

The numbers were great but it’s the comments that people have left for her that are particularly special. You can see them all here.

She spent a long time reading them and we had some great conversations about the structure of stories, classical myths and ways of grabbing and holding a reader’s attention.

Part of my job involves talking to people about their own storytelling so I was particularly interested to hear what it was that people responded to most. For a masterclass in classical storytelling read Dave Kernohan’s response.

My daughter added her own comment to the blog by way of thanks.

Thank you for the nice comments and soon I will write another.
I really enjoyed reading all your comments . At first it felt a bit weird to know my story was on the internet but now its okay. I learned that even though it was good I can still make it better.

What we learned

• People are kind.
• The knowledge that people have read and appreciated her story is a powerful motivator for my daughter. She’s already planning sequels!
• Both my kids now want their own blogs! Easy-peasy as I’m running a WordPress multisite so new websites are just a few clicks away.
• I should have thought about making it easy for people to comment before posting. The first version of the post went out on Medium as I wanted it to have a separate life from my blog (geeky, niche, not well-read) but Medium requires contributors to have an account. So, onto this blog it went. Much easier for everyone.
• Putting the story online, assuming that the story wouldn’t have won the 500 Words competition, meant that many more people read her story than would otherwise have done. She’s also had a lot of valuable, formative feedback.
• This was a one-off! There were so many tweets and pageviews because people felt that my daughter shouldn’t lose out because of my mistake. If she does start her own blog to post her future writing then she’ll have to work hard to build her own audience. This is no bad thing.

Thank you everyone who took the time to RT, read, share or comment on the story.