Sonnets from the Dark Side

For all things there is a time. There is a time to write and a time to joke, a time to fight and a time to choke. Forget the singing and sighing part; and few people reading this have any plans for dying in the foreseeable future, so --

There is a time to whinge and a time to gripe;
A time to cringe and a time to snipe;
A time for oysters, and one to be froogle...
And the day arrives when you gotta
Make nice with Google.

Before I go any further, if you're coming in at Part Three, you better catch up:

Darth Vader turns out to be Princess Leia's secret paramour; Chewbacca has been smuggling Corellian refugees into Tatooine without Han Solo knowing; Governor Tarkin is one quarter Jawa and terrified his secret will be discovered; Emperor Palpatine is learning to speak Booroogi, and keeps getting his face slapped in night clubs on the wrong side of town; Luke Skywalker has just gone undercover as a nightclub singer in a club called The Gaye Lightsabre; the plans to the Death Star turned out to be corrupted by having been immersed in red-hot sand, and they need a new set -- and R2D2 found out from the Death Star mainframe that Governor Tarkin has them tattooed on his bum (in very small printing), so Luke is hoping to get the Governor in a compromising situation while Han Solo hides in the next room with a camera and zoom lens. Meanwhile, C3PO has broken down for the sixth consecutive day and has been put into The Droid Hospital; Darth Vader has just arrived there to have his knee joints oiled, and recognizes the gold robot. As we join the story, Tarkin is insisting to Luke that he doesn't want a bath or a rubdown ... Han has discovered that his batteries are flat ... Threepio is trying to find a place to hide from Darth ... Darth is trying to send Leia a text to set up a tryst ... Chewbacca is being arrested for smuggling Corellians ... Emperor Palpatine is telling a belly dancer he "hopes you don't get caught in a speeder-masher before we can muck out the bantha stables, nudge nudge, wink, wink" ... and Artoo Deetoo is speeding to the rescue with fresh batteries.

All clear now?

If not -- feel free to click on this for the story of Keegan's Misadventures In Googleland...
Episode One: Search Engine Wars:
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/12/when-google-is-wrong-boy-is-she-wrong.html
Episode Two: A New Panic, or The Googlebot Strikes Back:
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/12/keegans-master-plan-for-2009.html

This is Episode Three: Google Policy, aka The Phantom Menace.

In other words, I still have zip, zero, nada idea of what happened, but my page ranking has been well and truly zeroed out, and it's staying zeroed out. Seriously, guys: not guilty. I didn't do nothing! So, anyway --

Yup. I waited out the time I set to see if the system was self-correcting (it isn't), and then I made a nice, soothing cup of tea (oolong), put on some soothing music, burned some joss, lit a candle, said a prayer ("O god in heaven, if you even exist, why d'you stick me on Goog's Black List? And if you didn't, which jerk is to blame? He's only still breathin' cuz I don't got his name") ... and I wrote a letter to Google.

A nice letter.

Full of polite, cheerful information, and bonhomie and well wishes for the holidays.

I got an autoresponse saying words along the lines of, "Thanks awfully for your email, allow several weeks for a response, and if there's no reason for you to have been shot dead, we'll give some serious thought to reinstating you."

That's what it MEANT, folks: if there's no reason for my page rankings to be 00.00, they'll THINK about reinstating them.

Well, with the holidays coming on, better look for an intelligent gurgling sound (googling sound?) by the end of January, I guess. Which means I'll be blogging for a very small audience till then -- which is fine by me.

What I really, genuinely like about the readership on this blog at this time is ... people are here because they want to be, not because Google, in its infinite wisdom, sent them here chasing a link to Gary Oldman, whose name was mentioned as a throwaway in one line of a post about something else entirely.

So -- odds and ends and trivia this time.

Tomorrow is the 11th anniversary of the death of Lane E. Ingram, an old friend of mine ... and since I'm going the way of the digital novel next year, and therefore have to work out where to start -- which 1,000 page novel to upload a post at a time! -- I found myself going through stacks of old, old writing. I came upon a draft of a story Lane and I were working on as long ago as 1990. Tales (extremely gay ones!) of elder Atlantis.

What better memorial to Lane than to resurrect the stories, get them into publishable order, and run them digitally. That's where we're going in the new year, guys: elder Atlantis, high magic and even higher adventure. Gay fantasy. It's going to be a load of fun. What does MK get out of it? With any luck, readers will give me the occasional click on the $1 donation button, and as the saying goes, "a lot of little things add up to a big thing." Free fiction? Boat loads of readers ... $1 here and there from a percentage = decent royalties!

Lane would be delighted.

Now, I have to get some work done!

Ciao for now,
MK