Celebrate Valentine's Day with Zero Dark Valentine

Back when I published a zine called Dark Valentine, I always worried that people would think the title was too "girlie" and that all we were going to publish were stories about virgins and unicorns. As it turned out, I needn't have worried. The website associated with the magazine may have folded, but the magazine archives is still around and you can read all the issues here.
I also never de-activated the Gooogle Alert for the phrase "dark valentine" and today it led me to a funny video in which a guy interrogates his girlfriend to find out what she wants for Valentine's Day It's called Zero Dark Valentine and it's clever.

Getting Lucky with Google Alerts

I love Google Alerts.  I love having digests of news stories on topics of interest delivered to my email in box every day.  Sometimes the alerts are short-term, reminders so I won't forget an upcoming event (a book publication date) or  way of researching a specific project. What I love about Google Alerts is that even if you're careful about defining and refining your search terms, you can get some bizarro results.

Right now I have a Google Alert on Grimm, the upcoming NBC television series.  I don't watch a lot of television and I'm always missing shows that sound interesting because I forgot they were on. And if they're not on Hulu or CastTv, I'm cooked. And don't tell me to DV-R them.  To do that, you have to know when they're on in the first place.  Hence the Google Alert.

So I get my Grimm Google Alert today and it includes this news story roundup from August 9, 1911, an account of various goings on at the time, including a speech by a suffragette named Miss Harriet Grimm.  She stopped speaking when a dog fight erupted up the street, realizing that no one was listening to her.  (She had a sense of humor about it.)  I hope Miss Grimm lived to cast her first ballot.

How I Know I'm a Real Writer

I am not ashamed to say I have a "Google Alert" set for my name. Not only does that allow me to keep up with the activities of Katherine Tomlinson of Manchester, England (pediatric nurse and music lover) and the Katherine Tomlinson who works in Vermont politics, but it also lets me know when I am mentioned somewhere.

The nature of the Internet being what it is, these mentions are sometimes very far away from their original source and like messages in the kids' game of telephone, sometimes you're surprised at what the final result is.

Tonight an alert showed up that sent me to a site that was offering a free e-book download of my story "Proof of Life," originally published on ThugLit. The story link was in with a bunch of links to articles about bathroom drains. My story had somehow come to their attention because of the phrase "bathroom drain" in my narrative.

Two years after the story appeared in ThugLit and a month after it was reprinted on A Twist of Noir, some unknown entity liked it enough to scoop it up and ... pass it around. They're not charging a fee for the download, so I'm inclined to view it as free publicity.

You're no one 'til somebody steals your work.