A Writer's Work Is Never Done

  What a week! I helped my friend relaunch his site, with press releases, social media, and other marketing stuff; I launched my new book (!) and have been doing marketing for that; I got a Google Adwords credit when I set up my custom domain hosting, so I set up an ad campaign through Google; I created a new landing page for my book to send the ads to, and added a couple more thousand words to my new writing project.
    Now, all I need to do is find time to write a couple essays and guest blog posts, on top of my regular weekly blog posts. And write my new story. And edit one I already wrote. And come up with a topic for NaNo this november. And so on. And so on.
    The story's still the same--I'm busier now than I was when I was working, but it's all good work--fun, challenging, interesting, and creative--so it hardly feels like work. Which is probably why I've been "working" such long hours! I set up my calendar differently so that all the "work" stuff gets done within 8 or 9 hours and all the other tasks that are more personal to-dos and fun to-dos, like catching up on my personal emails and writing my new story, happen after that 8 or 9 hour window.
    Still, I'm on my computer pretty much all day, so it doesn't really seem like there's much of a shift.

    In funner news: the fall television season starts tomorrow (NBC's first season premiere night) and I'm going to pick up a new blog entirely on television reviews and commentary. I actually started it last fall on WordPress, trying to get in the habit of writing every day to gear up for NaNoWriMo, but I gave up on it as soon as Nano started. This year, I'm going to try to keep up with it a little better.  I moved it over to Blogger so everything will be in one place for easy posting, and did a fun, if a little cliched, new design for it.
    Visit HappyToEntertain.blogspot.com starting Wednesday, 9/12, to follow the new fall shows, returning and new, on CBS, Fox, ABC, NBC, and FX and USA when a couple of my returning favorites come back in the next couple months.
    I'm going to have a hard time picking which ones to watch this year! Long list of new shows and old shows on new nights to pick from! Hulu and I will become best friends again for a few weeks while I weed out the decent shows from the crappy ones as well as the ones that are unfortunate enough to run in the same timeslot.

Turn on the boob tube: I'm in the mood to obey. 

-Jack Johnson

What I Do For A Living

  So one of my coworkers found this really awesome infographic yesterday: How Google Works. (I was TOTALLY going to insert it into the blog here, because they have some HTML code to do so, but it was about 20 pixels wider than my main content column, so I decided against it. UPDATE: I did preview it with the whole thing in there and it looked really buggered up, so just check it out on their site.) The infographic breaks down the process, in every excruciating detail, of how Google finds what you're looking for when you do a search. It's pretty extensive, to say the least.
    I'm not an SEO expert, and I've only been working in the Internet marketing and Search Engine Optimization business for about a year now (one year next month!), but this infographic really explains a lot about what we do where I work. Right now, I've been mostly managing the content for our sites, but part of what I do is making sure that search engines, like Google, can find the articles that we post to our sites by using SEO techniques. I can't say what we do or how we do it, as that would sort of be like exposing trade secrets--which is somewhere in that fifteen page document I signed when I started work--but knowing a little bit about how Google actually finds stuff is helpful to that aspect of how I do my job.
    I just thought it was interesting, and in such a world in which we rely on Google to tell us pretty much everything about our world, I thought some of you might find it interesting too.

Google it. If Google doesn't know, no one does. Or you suck at searching.