Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Absentee Blogger

I've been a bad girl on the blogging front lately, and for that you have my apologies. I have a good excuse though! I've started a new project and it has swallowed me up whole. Great wonderful gobs of writing are pouring off my fingers. It's a book! And I'm writing it! How neat is that?

And, in completely unrelated and distinctly unimportant news, I have recently found Google Alerts to be a constant source of hilarity. Here's the sitch: I have a Google Alert for each of my titles - so I am notified (in theory) of any mention of my books online and can then web-stalk the perpetrators to find out what people really think of me. However, this also means I am alerted whenever those words appear in completely unrelated contexts. So every morning, I get these emails from Google Alerts that I have begun to find wildly entertaining (because I'm an odd duck).

It starts off pretty normally - The Ghost Shrink links almost always take me to references to my book. Same deal with Serengeti Heat & Serengeti Storm - though I get occasional references to actuals storms on the actual serengeti, which is kinda cool. Then, for reasons I don't quite understand, The Ghost Exterminator alert keeps trying to get me to download ringtones.

And then there's my April releases, Shifting Dreams & The Sexorcist. For Shifting Dreams, 99.9% of the links are to random people's blog-poetry. This phrase is apparently used to a freakish degree in online poetic exposition. Who knew?

The Sexorcist Google Alerts are a horse of a different color. Half the time it links to some pretty kinky stuff I'm not sure my innocent mind wants to know about. From what I've figured there must be an online sex therapist who goes by this name. The other half are links to places where I can download songs from a Necro album of the same title. I don't know who Necro is, but I have to say, they have excellent taste in titles. I might have to check out their music, since I am bombarded daily with reminders of their titular awesomeness.

It's amazing the things I never would have known about in the webverse if not for Google Alerts. Long live the random information explosion of the internet.

(And I promise to have something more substantial to say tomorrow.)

3 comments:

KELLY FITZPATRICK said...

My Google alerts get me to some strange places...non or which have much to do with me.

Beth said...

I read a post on another author's blog that was similar to this. Only the title she had this happen with was Bait. You can imagine the kinds of hits she was getting. It's a good reason for distinctive titles.

Vivi Andrews said...

Hey, guess what! New Google Alert discovery: There is a racehorse named Serengeti Storm. Doing quite well, apparently. I may have to place a bet. :)