Ego Ogling

Being an obsessive self-googler, I've been entertained over the past year by the way in which hits for my novel have slowly outstripped those for earnestly evangelical sites about the life to come when searching for the phrase "city of the saved". I was also amused recently to see that Google has started returning one hit for a combined search on "sex secrets" and "robot replicants" which doesn't relate to my short story. Unfortunately, searching for "minions of the moon" only demonstrates how very unimaginative it is to use a Shakespeare quote for a title.

Searching for "peculiar lives", though, comes up with some wonderful stuff, a fact which for some reason I never discovered when it was the title of this blog. Excluding references to the blog and the novella, here are some of the items which get dredged up:

• The blurb for a book by Chuck Palahniuk, referring to "the peculiar lives of submariners".
• A barmily Dickian Treatise on Cosmic Fire by some esoteric philosophers.
• A great many references to a book called Grace, Beauty and Banjos: Peculiar Lives and Strange Times of Music Hall and Variety Artistes, of which I'd never previously heard. Oddly enough it appears to be the work of the actor Michael Kilgarriff, who played the Cybercontroller in The Tomb of the Cybermen and Attack of the Cybermen.
• A page about honeymooning in Mumbai, on what appears to be a marriage agency's website.
• An article about bacteria and food poisoning from the University of Helsinki.
• Some disturbing erotic fan fiction based around Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Among the things I had no particular wish to read this morning: "Buffy rose up and impaled herself on Giles, both letting out a heartfelt groan as she slid down his length.")
• An interview with Alan Moore about From Hell.
• An Addams Family fansite. Albeit not a very devoted one, as it seems to attribute the original cartoons to Scott, rather than Charles, Addams. (Dilbert vs Pubert, anyone?)
• A review of the computer game Phantom Crash, which apparently has a "peculiar lives structure"...

...etc. All of which may be very entertaining (except in that some of it isn't, obviously), but it's going to make it bloody difficult to ego-surf once the novella's published.

On another note, but also courtesy of Google -- who's been buying and selling shares in this blog? I didn't even know you could do that.