Request for Comment

You might have been directed towards this page by my site on Geocities concerning my novel, Dinner with Sigmund Freud. If not, allow me to explain. 7 years ago I wrote a novel and posted it on the web. It is still up on the web somewhere, in fact it's available here. When I first posted this on the web it received no attention, and I realize the reason behind it was that no web page linked to it, therefore it was not accessible by any search engine and therefore could receive no exposure. I decided to piggyback off of Colin Woodcock's web site, sent in my hyperlink to him and surely enough the hypelink to my novel became listed on his web page and I got free publicity by being linked to a more popular site. Little advantage did it yield for Colin Woodcock, since my novel did not receive much attention, at least not any that I know of. Throughout the next 7 rather lonely years I took joy in logging into my Geocities site and checking on the number of page views my novel received, and see the visitors trickling in day by day. Certainly, my novel was not as popular as, let's say, that book written about that certain boy wizzard in England, but nonetheless it got some attention, which was better than none. In all the course of the 7 years since I've posted this novel online I've received an estimated total of around 350 visitors, which after some fancy calculation using integrals amounts to one-seventh of a visitor using one-seven of a mouse clicking on my website everyday ;-) But in all seriousness, despite the dearth of visitors they appear to be quite loyal to my novel. Despite all the grammatical errors and typos that I've never corrected, I nonetheless still gained a following. I never understood why my novel still attracts attention, since it's not one of my best works. I've written more advanced novels since Dinner with Sigmund Freud, and so far I've failed to get attention for those other novels. Dinner with Sigmund Freud is a rather strange work in itself, since it was originally intended to be written as a science fiction novel, and I discovered throughout the course of writing that novel that I was a poor science fiction writer, so the novel became more driven by stories about personal relationships that are reminiscent of those that appear on sitcoms and soap operas rather than tradition sci-fi themes. I believe that the oddball genre of my novel, the fact that it's a psychological novel masquerading as a science fiction novel limited its popularity to a very select audience. That and combined with my lack of attention to details such as spelling and grammar almost spelled its demise.

Yet as I looked at the statistics of my web site, I came to the conclusion that it does have a following, however small it might be. My data has revealed that most of the visitors of my web site do not come from Colin Woodcock's web site but instead entered the hyperlink directly into their browser in order to access my web site (or some other method, I have no idea). I appreciate whatever small following Dinner with Sigmund Freud has, and if the community which enjoys my work (or at least do not ridicule it). I would also like the community to put some feedback. The main reason for this is that I do not trust the statistics on my web site provided by Geocities. For example, the statistics section says that about 10% of my visitors are visiting from machines that run FreeBSD. Considering the fact that far less than 10% of all computer users run FreeBSD on desktops (or laptop, FreeBSD may enjoy some popularity in servers and perhaps embedded devices, but my guess is that it's way behind in personal computers, even when compared with Linux), I would like to understand if my readers indeed are fanatics of FreeBSD or is it just a technical glitch which caused it to appear that way. In any case, I would like to understand what drives Dinner with Sigmund Freud, so please leave a comment so I would understand why people are reading this novel.

Some personal information about myself, I wrote Dinner with Sigmund Freud when I was 14. When I read the novel now the work seems so juvenile. One has a sense that it takes a teenage girl to write a novel in which the main character is a teenage girl, not that I am a girl which my sentence seems to imply. Since then I have written at least two more novels, maybe three...my memory is not all that good. My other passion besides providing the public with free novels (at any cost, by the way, including poorly written novels that are riddled with basic mechanical problems and unpolished language) is my love of free software. I run Ubuntu Linux on my laptop and OpenBSD on my desktop. Yes, in case there are any person out there who run BSD on their PC's, I feel a special brotherhood with you. (Well, not really, but I love Linux and BSD, and Plan 9. Frankly, in my philosophy of Unix the more the merrier.) So if you've enjoyed Dinner with Sigmund Freud, tell me about it. If you didn't enjoy Dinner with Sigmund Freud, also leave a comment. No death threats left in the comments, but do tell me if you think my novel is one of the worst pieces of trash ever to cast light onto you retina. Don't worry, I might have wasted my entire life by writing bad novels, but at least I didn't take any drugs to write them.