So I’m staring at the Kindle Direct Publishing Report page. It’s 5:08. Ghosts has been free for 14 hours and 8 minutes, and I have been so much more obsessive than I wanted to be. I think I managed to turn the computer off for an hour and a half. But I’m trying to refrain from pushing the Month-to-Date Unit Sales link again, because I just pushed it two minutes ago and really, how neurotic can I be?

I think, though, that there will be a moment sometime in the next two hours that I’d like to catch, so that I can write it down and post it to my OhLife and on some future day, I’ll get reminded of the exact, precise, specific time when 1000 copies of Ghost had been downloaded. And then I notice that there’s a little down arrow, indicating a menu, next to the View Report For Amazon.com field. And I look, and oh, you can also view the report for Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de and Amazon.fr and a few other Amazons, and that’s kind of cool.

Even cooler? At 5:08, 946 copies of Ghosts had been downloaded in the US. But 113 had been downloaded in the UK and 3 in Germany. Which means, basic math skills don’t fail me, 1062 copies total downloaded. And wow, wow, wow. Okay, lots of those people probably won’t read it and some of them won’t like it. But still, it is a thrilling feeling.

OhLife, incidentally, is a wonderful online journal: it sends a daily email that asks the question, How did your day go? and includes one of your past entries. Way too many of mine have been sad, and it’s made me less inclined to respond to the email. (Yesterday’s said, “Trying to write a girl from the 1950s. Six months ago, I could have called Mom for help with the voice. Sometimes the sad is just overwhelming.” Unsurprisingly, I didn’t feel inspired to answer it.) Today, though, today, I will definitely write back.

It’s 5:23. 961 copies downloaded in the US, 119 in the UK. Thank you all!