Googled to the Max

I consider myself a Google kind of girl. I confess I used to belong to the cult of the metacrawler.com and closed my ears to the outcries of the followers of the mighty Google. One day my metacrawler just didn?t seem meta enough for me. I gave Google a shot and was hooked.

Google bought Blogger a while back making me a double Google girl. Now I?ve got the Google toolbar on my blog along with adsense. Adsense is going to put Cullen through college, right?

Then they came out with gmail. I love this system. Tons of storage space, very easy to use and it indexes everything so I can find it later. Neil Gaiman uses his account to back up his work which I think is rather brilliant.

I did a gmail experiment this weekend. I had about 400 emails from Dan in my hotmail account. I want to get rid of the account. I don't really read those emails but I don't want to delete them either so I sent them to gmail to be indexed.

I was a little horrified to see that my gmail notifier said I had only 134 new messages out of the 400+ that I sent over. We used to send each other critiques of insanely stupid spam titles like Your cock so big you trip over it and I got to fretting that gmail was blocking what it thought was spam. I am very picky about my spam. I believe I am the only person smart enough to be able to tell what is spam and what is not. I don't want an automatic spam filter. That is what my brain is for. I won't be able to use an email that disposes of my mail before I can see it.

I was quite relieved to see that gmail had sorted out my mail into conversations. One subject heading had turned into a 53 response thread. Gmail did not let me down.

Here I was thinking I was about maxed out when it came to Google but Kevin proved me wrong. He sent me a link to Google Desktop Search. Oh. My. God. Talk about a swoony bit of software. It?s just plain wonderful.

I use it all the time now. The Windows search always slowed my system down and took about half an hour on my box. The Google version takes about five seconds for me.

Since it also searches pages I have visited it makes doing research for my day job a breeze. Yesterday I was putting together the Weekend Edition of the Daily Briefing and my editor wanted to focus on Emerging Markets. The stories looked awfully familiar to me so I did a search and found I had indeed already formatted the stories for BrokerUniverse/Origination News Special Reports. Instead of bothering my editor I had the answer to my question in under a minute. It?s fucking awesome. What can I say? I?m very curious about Google?s ambitious book project. http://print.google.com/ I can totally get behind the mission of Google, ?to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.? I?m all about being useful and accessible and I will follow this project with great interest.

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400 words of Bluer than the Night Sky today. Technically that is the second draft of that book but I am not sure it really counts as draft two. I cut 20,000 words from the 50,000 word first draft. Mind you I wrote the thing for November is Novel months and I knew a lot of it was going to go when I wrote it. I almost think this is the first draft v1.5.

But then again maybe it really is a second draft. When I wrote my second draft of Freeing the Madwoman I removed a couple of scenes and added a bunch more. I had a skeleton of a script when I finished the first draft and then I added all the lovely flesh. Perhaps that is what I am doing here.

I?m interested to see that on this round the female protagonist, who has no name because she is so disenfranchised by society we never learn it although I really know what it is, has more of a dialect and she decided she doesn?t want to curse at all. I?m going in and changing all the swears to other things. Maybe she is not as angry as she was when I wrote her last year.

When I say dialect I don?t meant that stuff like sho nuff that is so horrible to read and hardly ever works. I just mean she has more expressions from the South, like mashing the button instead of pushing it, stuff like that. In the first draft she has two distinct voices. She was raised in the South and you hear it when she talks about her childhood and then when she is an adult she is pretty much assimilated into a more boring style of speech. This time she is only boring when she is trying to discuss something clinically instead of getting emotional when she talks about it.

Im curious to see if anyone notices that she has no name. I noticed when I was about half way through that nobody ever calls her by her name and it seemed so important and such a symptom of her circumstances that I made sure the rest of the book was the same.

Sometimes when I wonder why I bother doing this, working on my fiction, sending it out, etc, when I could just write nonfiction for my work forever I will have to remind myself I am doing to see if anyone notices my poor nameless heroine.

Stephen King says 400 words a day and you will have a first draft in a year. I?m happy with today?s output. I hit my goal of more than four pages defaced, I finished reading Will Shetterly?s The Secret Academy, more than 400 words towards draft two of Bluer and I did some good research for the Entertainment thing I am going to do for BrokerUniverse. Go me!