Blogging & Googling

I’ve discovered this new late night past time. I google myself. But googling oneself isn’t healthy. I mean, I used to be a Catholic school teacher–I’m sure googling onself has got to be a sin. But if googling oneself is bad (checking for media mentions, booksigning listings, and the odd missed review) googling one’s self in a blog search is even worse. I did this by accident, trying to track down a blog a blogger had asked me to read, and I discovered that well, I’m in a couple bloggers blogs.

What I learned in this late night internet search is that real people (other than my mom) have bought The Frog Prince and read it and wrote about it. And that’s…wow…weird. Nice things were said but of course our tendency is to skip over the nice things and focus on the not so nice. But even then I have to say there were many nice things about Frog Prince in blogs. Which makes me wonder, how long has the universe been blogging? And why do I have an online travel diary and not a blog? (Unless I’m doing that old hip to be square thing….).

And reading blogs reminds me of reading reviews. Everything these days is so out there. Good, bad, ugly. Reviews at Amazon, reviews on websites, reviews on blogs. Authors can pretend we don’t care about the negative but google brings everything right into your own home when you least expect it. Frog Prince was read in France? Wow! Frog Prince sucks? Oh. Wow. See what I mean? It’s a smorgesbord, a virtual buffet of opinions all brought to you in the privacy of your own home. Which isn’t necessarily always a good thing.

Let’s face it, writers–like actors–are neurotic. We’re delicate. We have these self-esteem issues, and little voices chanting bad, nasty things in our heads. Fortunately we deal with these voices by writing books and short stories and sharing our fears with the world. Which of course solves the problem. (Does it?)

Oops. Look at the time. Nearly midnight. Time to google.