Sorry for the spam, but Andrea and I have a problem that we’re trying to resolve. One of our competitors got us de-indexed from Google, and we’re trying to locate someone inside Google to help us resolve the issue.

Here’s what happened. About 4 months ago a website called theretrobaby.com appeared on the Web. They were a copycat site to what we’ve been doing at babywit.com for the last 2 years. They copied our business model, our shirt ideas, our page layout, our page structure, and even copied some of the verbage from our site. Whatever. Our stuff is better than theirs—we really don’t care. There are a lot of copy cats out there.

Anyway, last week Google sent us an email stating that they were de-indexing our site, because we were using hidden keywords on our site. We were a bit baffled by this because we’ve been doing the same thing for two years and never run into any problems, but we were willing to accept that we’d made a mistake and do whatever we could to fix our site so that it could be reindexed. It was just one of the many bumps in the road a small business owner who can’t possibly know all the rules runs into in the course of running their business.

Well… about two hours after we were de-indexed a gentleman named Ray from Florida leaves a message with Kristin, our production manager, stating that he saw we had de-indexed and wanting to “help us out.” We didn’t call him back. Ray, however, was persistent, he phoned us again stating that he was Ray from The Retro Baby. Amongst other things, Ray bragged that he owned over 60 websites, that he got de-indexed all the time for various offences, and that he knew ways to get around the system and get re-indexed in 15 seconds. Of course, he would not divulge any of this information to us, but what he did offer to do for us was to buy our website address…

It became very clear to us during the course of our conversation that Ray was the person who had reported us as spammers to Google. Andrea and I are so mad about the situation that we’ve thought of everything short of pipe bombs to take Ray out. In the end, though, what we really want is for Google to change their system so that genuine spammers can’t ruin small businesses like ours. As it stands, spammers like Ray who know all the tricks and workarounds can report a business like ours, a small business that doesn’t know all the rules, to Google, and simultaneously take out their competition and move themselves to the top of the search engine.

Google is plagued with spammers at the top of their rankings who manipulate the system and then produce shitty thrown-together products to consumers. I want Google to know what happened to us, because I’m sure Ray, with his 60 other websites, has done this to other small businesses before. And I’m sure there are a lot more Rays out there.

If you know of someone who works at Google, or know of someone who knows someone who works at Google, please forward this message along. It would be nice to get our site re-indexed—we’ve lost 75% of our business and had to let go of our part-time employees—but mostly we just want Google to realize that their search engine is being manipulated.

Why yes, now that it’s actually going, I can.

On Friday, I finally had a break-through day where I was able to add four new pages that I was happy with to the book. For the last couple weeks, it’s been a lot of cutting and patching and scratching my head. Mostly, it’s just taken me a while to get back into the vibe of the material. Picking up a book helped. I discovered André Trocmé’s classic book Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution on the racks at the Portland Public Library, and it's gotten me back into the spirit of my novel.

I know you're thinking yawn, and probably also you, Jim Frost, are reading a book about Jesus but it's a good read, especially if you're writing a book like AVMP.

Labels: Writing Process

My wife recently revealed on her blog that she has a lesbian lover. I had no idea. It's amazing how little we know about the ones we love.

My editor has asked me to help her to obtain endorsements for my book. An endorsement, in case you're not familiar with the term, is publisher-speak for those tacky blurbs by other authors that litter the back covers of most books.

When I asked my mentor, Lewis Buzbee, for some ideas about who I should approach, he had an interesting anecdote about the origin of the word "blurb."

One more note about blurbs. Two actually. Do you know where the term blurb comes from? In the early decades of the twentieth century, publishers used to wrap a paper jacket with endorsements around new titles. These jackets invariably included a buxom young blonde. Gelette Burgess, an American humorist of the time, he who wrote "I never saw a purple cow..." was so chagrinned by this that he designed his own jacket, with buxom blonde, and he called her Miss Blinda Blurb. The name stuck. You see, it's always been a heinous business, asking for blurbs. You just gotta do it.

This business of whoring myself isn't one of my favorite aspects of being an author...

I don't cry very often, but Riverbend consistently gets me to shed a few. Read the September 11th post.

Long time, no blog.

I've been derelict in my blogging duties: my excuses are many. At the end of August, I finished the last draft of WLP and shipped it off to my editor. As the rewrite had been a struggle, I decided to eschew all things writerly during the month of September, and to instead go on a long hiking trip with my good friends Anthony and Frank, spend time with relatives, and delve even deeper into my devious Utopian world.

Seeing as I wasn't writing, I found very little to say in my blog about the writing process...

I spent the first week of October refamiliarizing (yes, yes, I know that's not a word) myself with AVMP. It had been 5 months since I'd last worked on it, so I didn't quite know what to expect. I was fairly happy with the first half of the novel, and though there are some things that will need working on, I decided to leave it alone in my next rewrite. The second half of the novel starts off very, very slowly, and the end, as I mentioned in a previous post comes way too quickly. This is the part I've decided to focus on in the next draft.

Having decided where I needed to do work, I sat down this past Monday, and started working on it. This involved much pulling at the hair, and sudden urges to walk to the coffee shop, or clean the house, or run to the hardware store. Needless to say nothing got done until Thursday, when I finally managed to pump out a couple of meagre pages.

Once I get my head around it, though, this looks to be an interesting rewrite. I was emboldened by my experiences editing WLP for St. Martin's, and I'm able to cut pages with greater abandon. It used to be very hard for me to cut sections that were well-written but didn't fit well into the story line, but I yanked out 30 pages of AVMP today without so much as a blink. I'm hoping that the cuts will leave me with a more controlled novel than WLP. The whimsy of the novel will make it a very good read, but AVMP has more of a moral to it, and therefore, like a John Irving novel, it needs a firmer direction.