Ode to my number 1 fan

I'd just like to take a moment and offer this warm "Welcome Back" message to my number one fan. I do not know who this person (we'll call them Fan) is. All I know is that about a year ago, when I had 500 some reviews on Amazon.com, my number one Fan systematically went about giving one positive vote to each of those reviews. All 500 some of them. Now, almost every day, Fan gives me a positive vote for my review of the day. I've never, to the best of my knowledge, received so much as an e-mail or a note from this person. I know next-to-nothing about him or her. But this Fan is a comfort to me. We even have a schedule of sorts. Fan knows that I like to write my reviews in the evening and post them at that time. That means Fan will check my Amazon page for updates in the evening and in the morning. Sometimes I miss a day or Amazon holds back a review for some unknown reason. But Fan is patient.

Patient but not excessive. If I post the same review for two different printings of the same book, Fan will give only one a positive vote. Not the other. This is the only time that Fan doesn't give me a vote. Sometimes Fan won't check to see if I've done more than one review in a day and will miss a review by mistake. But what I like about this person is that they love my reviews unconditionally. I have such loopy ideas that Fan is bound to disagree with me from time to time, but does that stop him/her from voting for me? Not a jot.

This week, however, I had a panic attack. I knew that I ran a risk starting this blog. I feared that Fan would notice this and decide that giving my Amazon page positive votes was lame and would stop doing it, turning solely to Fuse #8 for their review quotient. It's not the votes that matter so much to me (though being #116 of Amazon's top reviewers is a bit of a kick) but the fact that Fan keeps me going. You're so much more likely to write a review a day when you know that there is someone out there who likes what you do and checks up on you regularly.

People have asked me if Fan is my mother or my husband on the sly. I'd like to think that those two people check up on me as often as Fan does, but neither of them have any idea of how many reviews I write until it comes up during Thanksgiving dinner or some such time. No, Fan is a complete unknown. A real trooper. And now, I am happy to report, Fan has come back from some trip (something mysterious and internet-free, I like to think) and has given every review written in his or her absence a healthy singular vote.

It's good to have you back, Fan. You keep me honest.