Allies of Ill-Repute

Oh, I know theoretically how I want to achieve fame and fortune. Write the best book I possibly can, send it to my ninety favorite agents, wait for one to choose me out of a slushpile of thousands, wait for THEM to send it to their thirty favorite publishers, wait for one of THEM to say "oooh, brilliant!" and offer to publish it, then I edit it in a way that they don't get pissed off and fire me, pray for ten months they don't merge, restructure or go under in the meantime, then voila! Published book!

See though... I'm not very good at patiently leaving my fate in others' hands... Oh, I know... the writing was me... the ninety query letters will be me (23 down), the editing will be me, but there are an awful lot of things completely out of my control in that scerario.

I am of course writing MORE books to increase my odds that ONE of them will get through the slough, but in the meantime... fame where it can be had... Is ours for the taking!


It's Mari's Fault.

I've got this friend with a brilliance for making up words (Mari, can you PLEASE work on a one-word word for that skill? Because word-making-upper is getting tedious.). When she started blogging (a dalliance she followed ME into, mind you, so I will take a LITTLE credit), she cleverly titled her blog the Giraffability of Digressions . Now Digression isn't unusual, especially for those of us who consider it religion (Mari, BrioNi, and Me), but Giraffibility... now there's a word you don't see every day. So after a few days of blogging, she proudly announced that if you Googled Giraffability, the only hit was her blog... Giraffy (clearly the adjective that goes with the noun Giraffability) you got a single hit that wasn't her (about a really tall football player--she called it football anyway, and who am I to insist it's soccer?). So in just a few days, she had attained a little slice of fame!

Well Tara, not to be outdone, ALSO followed me into blogging (I'm not without influence--make sure you note that), and managed a similar coup with her Wobbly Sausage post. She is now the number one Google hit for Wobbly Sausage (which struck me as baffling, really--I thought wobbly sausages would be a widespread topic. Then yesterday she says, "I'm also the number one hit for Kairdiff Slag!" That Kairdiff Slag is outdoing us all!   [and you absolutely HAVE to read the post that goes with it, but swallow your coffee first--it's a monitor sprayer]

So I started wondering if I had achieved such fame... (there was a hint maybe I had with the number one nudist group hit for blogs if you searched in Portuguese [see 2 days ago])

But alas... I'm not so much a big fancy word writer, as a writer who reconfigures FAMILIAR words in new and exciting ways!

I tried it with Naked World Domination Tour, and though I managed a Google page one, I was the last on it. Google blasphemously put things ahead of me that didn't even grasp the CONCEPT of a Naked World Domination Tour... oh, there was a naked bike tour (ouch--one of the few things I will NOT be doing naked--one bump and... well, you get my point), and there were several dour world domination hits--pffft! Those people are entirely missing the point! BUT....

If I put it in quotes, all the hits were me (three blog posts and two HPANA hits that weren't so much ME and my minions talking ABOUT me)... then I went to Google blog search and tried, and at least I was the top hit.

I am thinking about trying it with such staples as "Delusional Thursday" and "Death Eaters in Drag".

But Your Lesson of the DAY!!!!!!

You too, by adopting a word (a la Mari), a marginally literate culture that has wonky spelling (a laTara) or a phrase (a la moi--say, I like that), can achieve Google fame, too! (And isn't it more fun that waiting around for somebody ELSE to make you famous?)