Happy Birthday, Miss Edna

Today would've been Edna Milton Chadwell's 85th birthday. Miss Edna passed away in February of last year, the last surviving madam of the infamous Chicken Ranch in La Grange, Texas, and inspiration for Miss Mona Stangley and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Not many people will realize today is her birthday. Far more will commemorate the birthday of famed fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien today, and honestly, I'd never realized before now that they shared the same birthday. Somehow, I suspect Miss Edna never read The Lord of the Rings, although she did keep an extensive library at the Chicken Ranch for her working girls to read during off hours.

Out of curiosity, I went and checked my stats for 2012. My website, at JaymeBlaschke.com, had more than 15,000 unique visitors for the year, with a peak of more than 1,700 on March 1. That's right as the news of Miss Edna's passing broke into the general media buzz. Compare that with the modest spikes of a couple hundred visitors in December when Larry L. King and Charles Durning passed away, reviving a little more Chicken Ranch curiosity among the general public. This blog clocked nearly 20,000 unique visitors over the same span--double the traffic of 2011--although not everyone visiting the blog came looking for Chicken Ranch information. Even so, the busiest days were Feb. 27-March 1, when 3,000 people came here looking to find out what had happened to Miss Edna. Those aren't Boing Boing numbers, sure, but I'd like for publishers and agents to look at them and tell me with a straight face that there's no interest in the Chicken Ranch.

Happy birthday, Miss Edna. We'll get this book published, just be patient!

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