This week has been uphill so far as the writing is concerned - a 4.30am start on Tuesday left me struggling to stay awake in the hours I usually reserve for writing. Still, 500 words a day with no pressure to publish works wonders and by Wednesday night I had the scenario and the central joke for the 'Half Cocked in Hampshire' story. The beginning has been rewritten more than any other section, and was last to be finished.

The latest episode (Half Cocked in Hampshire) is more blatantly parodic than usual and I fretted about that, but decided to go ahead with it regardless - published on the blog on Wednesday, flyer out to my Facebook friends and hey presto! record number of viewings on Thursday....the comments are beginning to flow now - (thanks to Gerard Jones who broke the ice!).

To promote the stories I have created a spoof 'fan page' on Facebook for the author Peregrine Percival Oatenshaw - contains photographs of his family, a thin joke but nonetheless amusing. I encouraged my friends to become 'fans' of this fictitious character and am now watching, slightly bemused as complete strangers have begun to appear! This page is linked to via the 'about the author' section on the blog.

Interestingly the hits on the blog on thursday amounted to nearly double the quantity of 'fans', so something is building quite nicely within the Facebook community. The blog is beginning to pick up syndication links - automatically generated on the 'In Crouch End' website, referring a couple of people a day and (thanks guys!) a reasonable number of hits from the Redroom.

So far the audience is heavily dependent on my personal network and my Facebook network, I need to extend beyond those boundaries. By my reckoning, I need 1000+ casual readers to get 100 regular readers - the stats so far suggest a much higher ratio are returning, which I'd like to think is a good sign :-)