Searchin’ the Search Phrases: 2011

Every year, I go through the search phrases that resulted in a hit on my site and I pick a few of the odd/funny/kickass ones to post here. This year I made it into a contest, so if you entered be sure to scroll to the bottom to see if you won. ;)

Lots of searches for my name this year, which is a good thing. It was often misspelled, which is also a good thing for reasons I explained in the 2010 post. One was spelled so wrong (ryouen mvbraid) that I’m fully convinced that person was looking for someone else entirely. Lol.

The site got six hits with “homepage” which baffles me. How many pages do you have to scroll through to get to my place with that single word? Not five, I know that for sure. O.O

Reading the year’s list was interesting. A lot of searches for particular stories, and the interest was spread fairly even among them, which makes me glad. I figure it means I’m doing something right.

Anyway, without further ado, in no particular order, listed below are some of my favorite search phrases from 2011:

• atari muscles growth
  Whatever this game is, I want it. Bad.


• bishie vs muscle
  It seems like it’d be no contest, but don’t underestimate the power of sparkles.


• davey s destiny finished?
  *headdesk* Working on it.


• clean muscle growth fiction
  Pfft. Who wants that? {ducks from Davey's Destiny fans}


• read flow by rowan mcbride
  I absolutely agree with this. Hopefully it’ll be available again once I rewrite it and send it to my publisher...


• always wait is best so just wait i ll be right back
  Okay. I’ll just sit here quietly, then.


• rowan mcrainbow
  {gasp} Dude, I should change my name to that.


• hermione muscle growth story fiction
  No. Just... no.


• what can you do with one good hand
  Lots of stuff! Ace can totally fill you in on that.


• quotes about a good poker hand with aces
  {snerk} Dirty thoughts.


• wet suck lick moan thrust unbutton hard
  Wow, I’m a little hot under the collar just reading that search phrase. Let me know if you find the story you’re looking for. XD


• biceps sit ups sweat bastard sargent exercise novel excerpt
  That sounds hardcore. And kind of scary.


• short story about my tastes in music
  Let me know what your tastes are and I’ll see what I can do. :)


• when is rowan mcbride releasing a new book
  Pretty good chance there’ll be a new one out January 18th. :-D

And my favorite out of the non-contest entries:

• beekeeper muscle stories
  I don’t know. I just keep imagining some dude getting stung by a bee and packing on muscle so fast that he bursts right out of his beekeeper suit. Which, of course, opens him up to being stung by more bees. :)

My contest favorite?

• fucking good kick Thumper poetry

Submitted by AS.

Hilarious, right? A first page result, even. ;)

I chose it because it was so random that when I read it the first time I had to, well, read it a second time.

Congrats to AS and thank you to everyone who entered. You guys made for some interesting emails in December!

I hope your 2012 is also interesting, as well as fun and safe.

Take care,

-- Rowan

My phone is a ninja...

I could be holding the sucker in my hand only to find it gone a second later. Below are some of the places I've found it.

• In the couch


• Under the couch


• Behind the couch


• In the garage.


• Inside a Yu-Gi-Oh! sneaker


• Teetering on the brink of a hotel bedpost


• In the pantry.


• Stuck in the middle of a Jenga tower (because my brother is evil).


• On top of a pile of salt.


• In the fridge, next to the milk.


• Inside the VCR (I suspect my three year old niece had a hand in this one but I have no proof).

Let's Play With Search Engines

I want to try a little experiment.

At the end of every year I post a "Searchin' the Search Phrases" list containing my favorite key word phrases that have resulted in a hit on my site during that year. This time I'd like to make it more...interactive.

So here's the thing. Come up with a creative search phrase about me, my stories, muscle growth, etc. and type it into an engine like Google or Bing. If my site comes up (the one at www.RowanMcBride.com, not this blog), click on the link. Clicking is important--it has to actually result in a hit so I can see the genius you have wrought in my stats aggregator. Then email your phrase to mcbride_rowan@yahoo.com (mcbride_rowan at yahoo dot com) with "Search Phrase Contest" in the subject line. At the end of this month I'll post my usual list, but I'll also post my favorite fan-generated phrase.

That fan gets a free copy of the new book on release day. Which will be in mid-January. Ish.

Sound fun? Let's play.

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Edit: Forgot to mention that you can enter as many times as you want. XD

Pepero Winners

The winners from the Pepero drawing of yesterday are Victoria (chocolate) and Teddy (strawberry). Please drop me a line at mcbride_rowan@yahoo.com with your snail mail addresses. :)

Congrats! And thank you to everyone who participated!

A Just Perfect Pepero Day

I'm backsliding into terrible title territory. And rampant alliteration, apparently. Still, I don’t think it’s as bad as Recharging with My Einstein Hair or Down with OTP (yeah you know me).

Ahem. Anyway.

I have news! And salutations! And prizes!

News: Just Perfect is tentatively slated for release in January 2012 from Torquere Press. W00t!

Salutations: Happy Pepero Day! This is a Valentine-like holiday celebrated in South Korea where candy is given to friends and loved ones. Pepero is usually the gift of choice, because Pepero comes in the form of delicious sticks of goodness and the sticks resemble elevens. Hence the November 11th date. And this year is particularly cool because it’s 11-11-11. In Japan it’s Pocky Day for the same reasons, although I hear the holiday itself is not as popular there.

Prizes: See these cylinders of heaven pictured below?



Yeah, giving them away. All you have to do is comment on this blog post any time today (11.11.11, Central Standard Time) and tell me which one you'd prefer. I’ll pick two names at random. One lucky person will win the strawberry Pepero, and one lucky person will win the dark chocolate Pepero.

Winners will be announced 11.12.11, so be sure to check back here to see if you've got yourself a cylinder.

Happy Pepero Day!

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It's also Veterans Day but I'm always unsure how to go about observing that one. My dad and brother are both vets and sometimes it seems wildly out of place to say "Happy Veterans Day." So I'll just say thank you to all those who've served their country. You've made tremendous sacrifices on our behalf, and I am humbled by your courage.

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Yaoi-Con 2011 Write-Up (Part 1 of 3)

Bad Decisions, Good Friends, and Gold Label Tequila

Ahhh. Back from Yaoi-Con. So much to report and I don’t want to make the same mistake I did last year (posting my 2010 pics the week before leaving for the 2011 con) so I’m breaking my convention post into three manageable parts.

Part one starts with day one which was filled with liquor. So. Much. Liquor. I arrived on Thursday and had a tall B-52 with T.C. Blue. We had dinner—for me it was oysters and a martini. There may have been fries involved. T.C. gave me some wicked business cards:




It sorta gets fuzzy after that. I’m a bit of a weird lush in that I’ll get drunk off a bottle of beer but I can do several shots and still be fairly steady, so when I’m in public I tend to just do hard liquor. This was probably not the best decision, but I do remember being happy and friendly. I got to meet Clare London, Andrew Grey, Mary Calmes, and a circle of other authors that first night. Hopefully they remember me being happy and friendly as well. I traded cards with Mary:



She’s a Samurai Champloo fan which gives her instant cool cred.

No hangover Friday. I’m told that’s a miracle, but I’ve never had one so I have no comparison. Although to be safe, I didn’t have any more alcohol till my last night in San Francisco. It was absinthe. XD

Back to Friday—registered for the con without mishap. Saturday I got to have dinner with some cool comic book kids:





Alex is a friend I met last year. He is the man of a thousand cards and if you’re not reading his web comic Artifice, why aren’t you? It’s freaking made of awesome.

Met the Category3 Circle for the first time this year. Their comics are brand new-to-me and I bought their Close to you anthology (which includes the story Dentente) at the con. It’s much fun.

I also got to talk with About.com Manga blogger Deb Aoki. And after the convention I crashed on Jen LeBlanc’s floor. Jen LeBlanc is the editor of Viz’s new Boys’ Love imprint SuBLime Manga. SuBLime's first titles are coming out in December and they are sweet.

Perks of the floor? I got to molest piles of manga. And I got to visit Viz Media. AKA heaven.

So that’s Part One of my convention report. Loved collecting everyone’s cards and loved sharing them here. Had a blast chatting up old friends and meeting new ones. I got a bunch of them to take the seme/uke test at http://semeuke.com and one of them came up "Chibi Seme" which I had never heard of before. I'm an "Opportunistic Seme" in case you were wondering and never saw that bit of info back in the day on my MySpace page. And yeah. Pretty much as bad as it sounds. ;)

This is just off the top of my head. Did not even come close to listing everyone I ran into. This is why if you see me you need to give me your card. Not only do I adore collecting them, but I tend to choke during the write-ups. XD

Next:
Part two: Stuff
Part three: Cosplay

Ah, the horror.

I was just starting fourth grade when I saw my first Freddy Krueger movie. Nightmare on Elmstreet 3: Dream Warriors. It freaked me out bad. Prior to that all my monsters had clear and specific ways to defeat them and in my head these things seemed doable should I ever find myself in trouble. Werewolves and silver? Check. Vampires and stakes through the heart/sunlight? Check and check. Mummies? Find the loose bandage and unwrap that sucker. Check. (At the time this was Flawless Logic.) I wouldn’t be introduced to zombies till the following year, so we were good to go.

Until Freddy Krueger. Because you can’t fight sleep.

Sure, some of the characters won out in the end. But then there’d be a sequel and they all went down eventually. Even Nancy.

These days not a lot of movies scare me. I do remember having a full-on WTF when it turned out the zombies in the Dawn of the Dead remake could run at top speed. That sure as hell wasn’t in my Zombie Survival Guide. But once it was over, it was over. It didn’t keep me up at night or anything.

Still, every so often I’ll stumble across something that turns me right back into that little kid staring wide-eyed at the screen watching a knife-gloved man tearing through the dreams of innocent people while they slept.

The topiary scene in the book version of The Shining. The whole damned “Blink” episode in Doctor Who. That split second revelation while I watched In the Mouth of Madness for the first time. I think what gets to me is the loss of control and total inability to save myself from it. How can I be sure that sound is just leaves in the wind? How do I not blink? What do you mean I’m already there?

In most horror stories, if you’re fast enough/strong enough/smart enough then there’s a chance you can wrest control of your own fate. The ones that get to me most are the ones where that’s not even an option.

Which begs the question: Why the hell did I write Want Me? Joel loses all control of self and fate when Walker invokes his spell in chapter one. And every turn of the spiral slices that loss deeper.


The story scared the bejeezus out of me while I was writing it. When it was first released I put a warning on all my portals that it was a dark, dark book. I was sure it was going to freak everyone out.

One of the first fan-letters I received said something to the effect of “Read your book. With the way you were talking I was expecting mountains of corpses or something, though.” So my definition of scary is certainly not universal.

When people ask about Want Me, I never call it a Romance. Usually I refer to it as Erotic Horror and I’m somewhat alarmed when a reader tells me it’s the first book of mine they’ve picked up. What a first impression to make. But for the most part they seem to have been good impressions.

What Romantic/Erotic Horror stories have made good impressions on you? Which ones had scenes that stuck with you weeks, months, years later? Anything scaring you this Halloween? ;)

Just a Reminder

Heading off for San Francisco today. YaoiCon should be a blast. Hope to see you there!

PS-- Not doing the "Where's Rowan" hide-and-seek this time. But I am bringing the hat, so if you want to meet up, drop me a line on twitter, here, etc, and I'll be sure to have it on me so that I'm recognizable. :)

Tango

Thanks to The Yaoi Review for sending me this vid. Precision is so sexy. The hot guys in well-tailored suits help too.




For more information on the art of him-and-him tango, you can go to: http://www.verytango.com/tango-men.html.

Goin' to Yaoi-Con 2011!

October 21st through 23rd I’ll be at Yaoi-Con in San Francisco! W00t! It’s really short notice but I only found out last week that I would be able to go, then this week my mother ended up in surgery and I ended up in the emergency room for completely unrelated reasons, so things have been a little crazy. After I finish writing up this post I fully intend to stare up at my ceiling fan and listen to Enya for at least an hour.

Are any of you guys going? I’m not sure if I’ll be playing Where’s Rowan this year—Would you be interested in playing again? If so, I might also do an online version this time around where you can look for me via twitter. I’m not sure. It depends on how I feel after Enya stops playing. ;)

In celebration of my trip to Yaoi-Con 2011, I’m posting a few pics from Yaoi-Con 2010, which I never got around to posting because my SD card got corrupted and I lost most of my images. It depressed me, yada yada yada. But some good ones survived, and here are three:

A friend and I won a bishie in an auction. Here he is in his in all his Ichigo hawtness posing with Alex Woolfson, another friend of mine and writer of a fab webcomic called Artifice.

I don't know who they are, but I love the hell out of butterflies.

Cutest. Frog. Ever.
In my head all I could hear was "Kero Kero Keroppi."

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So that's three snapshots of last year's Yaoi-Con. If you'd like to see more, check out my flikr account at http://flic.kr/s/aHsjwifMdr. Feel free to leave comments there, and let me know here if you're going to the con!

Wrote a book! Signed a contract!

It’s called Just Perfect, and it’s going to be published by Torquere Press. I can’t share a lot of details yet, but you can read the blurb as well as a short rambling about the story by me at: http://www.rowanmcbride.com/stories/drayners/justperfect/. Right now you can’t actually get to that page from anywhere on my site—the link I just posted is one of two access points to it. The first was posted on my newsletter back on Friday, which is one of the perks of being on the mailing list. ;)

Just Perfect is the (hopefully) first in my Drayner series. Unless you happened to catch my now out-of-print short story Just Wait back in 2007, then for you it’s a prequel. Although Just Wait may or may not still be an official part of the series anymore. It’s complicated. There were twins involved. Sexy, scary twins.

But hey, my first book in two years. And it’s all...dark and twisty and such. Should be good times whatever happens, yeah?

Names and Master Plans

This post is probably going to be even more ramble-y than my usual, so there’s that.

I started a story recently where I changed the name of the main character three times. That never happens to me. In a best case scenario, when I imagine a character for the first time he already has a name attached. In other, less desirable situations, I spend hours—sometimes days—going through my baby name book, name websites, and scrolling through my television menu for random actor names until I find something that fits, dammit. But something always does, even if I have to eventually make it up. The name captures the person.

Until this new guy. He started out as a Dan, then as a Ray, and currently he is Neil. At the moment I’m not entirely sure I think his name is Neil. It’s really disconcerting. I can’t even start a story unless I know who the main characters are, and here I have one and I can’t pin down his name. I feel like I’m writing about a ghost. Which I’m not.

Then come the repeats. I’m not sure what the writer etiquette is on that. I have a Michael in Michael Finally Grows Up (which was updated late last month—yeah!), but I also have a Michael you’ve never met, in a sequel that I promise I’m working on slowly but surely. In this case I don’t think it’s so bad because MFGU is a free serial and in a different category from the novel I’m working on. Separation challenge: Easy.

Things get murkier when the stories are both books. Jesse Winter is still my favorite character I’ve created, but a few days ago this new idea popped up in my head, along with a brand new character whose name was…Jesse. I figured I had to change it, but Derek—the love interest—calls him Jess and how hot is that? Keith never called his Jesse Jess. Of course, Derek is the name of this guy I’d had planned for a fairy tale down the road…

*headcramp*

I’ve lost count of how many idea files I have on my hard drive. How many “chapter ones” I intend to spin out into fully realized tales. I also have a spreadsheet to keep track of all the names, to help keep my myriad of master plans and distinct worlds from colliding with each other. And yet I have two Michaels, two Jesses, and a dude who may or may not be a Neil.

Sometimes I wonder why I put so much effort into names, anyway. Would the content of my stories be that much different if I named half my characters Bob? Then I take Jesse from Warm Rush, and try to imagine him as, oh I don’t know, a Duke or something, and that really doesn’t seem like it could work. But Duke from G.I. Joe? What other name could he have? Also—hot.

This new Jesse? I’ve tried retro-fitting him with different names. Nothing works so far. I think about books I’ve read by authors I love and I have to admit, unless it’s the same universe, I don’t pay attention to names (or similarities, or repeats) from one series to another. But then I’m freakishly bad with names (hence the spreadsheet mentioned above to help me remember my own characters) so I’m most likely not the best sampling here.

What do you think? Is it confusing when an author has two characters with similar names, even if the story worlds never overlap? Or does the fact that I have around 250 names used (as in seen in a published/posted story) or on reserve (as in featured in one of my many “chapter ones”) in my spreadsheet make it a big enough pool that I can use a couple of them more than once?

And Neil, or whatever the hell his name'll be by the end. Still no idea what to do about him. Maybe he'd work as a Bob...

So much for master plans. >.<

Michael Finally Grows Up - Comments Section

Story Blurb:

When up-and-coming artist Avery Scott spots a shy wallflower at a party, he just can't seem to help himself-- he brings him home. Michael's sexual hungers tread on the kinky side, even by Avery's standards, but Avery is more than capable of giving him what he needs. Before he knows it, five years have gone by, and Michael is still in his bed. Avery is comfortable. Even happy. And he's famous, which is a bonus.

But now Michael is changing... into something that Avery's been having nightmares about for most of his life.

http://rowanmcbride.com/stories/mfgu/index.html

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If you'd like to make a comment about any of the MFGU installments, or the story as a whole, you can do it here.

Sorry I've been absent.

Been sick. Still sick, but feeling a little better now. Even been writing a bit, and *might* have something to post soon. XD

Muscle Growth on the Silver Screen

Words can not describe how much I love this trailer:

Sending Relief to Japan

Yaoi-Con is auctioning off some amazing stuff, and all proceeds will go to the relief effort in Japan. More information can be found on their main site, while the actual auction is at http://ycon-auction.livejournal.com/. I've already put down a bid on a Vash and Wolfwood poster.

If you'd like to donate money through more traditional channels, click here for six ways more ways to help the victims of the earthquake/tsunami.

Also, prayers appreciated for my best friend's mother. We haven't been able to contact her yet.

Pretty Words

Two things happened in my writing life recently that were kind of interesting and kind of related. First—I finished a novella. I think I’m going to title it Just Perfect despite the fact that it’s one of my darker stories but we’ll see. It’s in a revision stage, after which I’ll submit it to a publisher, so keep your fingers crossed. The second is that I’m currently working on another story and I finished writing a sex scene that I started in…2009, I think. Yeah, I got stalled pretty badly there. It might have been a good stall though because when I look at the plotline it doesn’t seem believable to me anymore, and I think I’ve got a better direction now for the book. Silver lining and all that.

The thing that kind of relates these two stories is language. When I was writing Just Perfect, I was afraid I’d lost the sense of lyricism I was so proud of in books like Lone and Paul’s Dream. Some might say I’m a little too in love with that sort of writing, but I’m really attached to pretty words, sentences that flow. The language in Just Perfect is hard, straightforward, and to the point. It wasn’t until I’d finished the story and read it all the way through for the first time that I realized this was Draven’s (the main character’s) voice, and that it fit. He’s an assassin, after all. And one who likes his job.

The story I’m working on now has more of the pretty words I thought I’d lost, which makes sense. Both characters in this one are nicer, gentler, a lot more innocent. They think differently so they express themselves differently.

I forget, sometimes, that it’s the characters who set the tone for a story, and that as long as you stay true to them, the words may not always be “pretty,” but they’ll always flow. And just because I’m stretching my writing muscles from time to time, doesn’t mean I’ve lost my touch.

It might even mean I’ve gotten better. (This is me, trying to be more optimistic as per my New Year’s resolution.)

;)

Thanks for the recs!

I know it's sick and wrong, but I like a little darkness to read during the Valentine's season. Now I have what looks like a fantastic list to choose from.

Thanks again--I'll be having a lot of fun, I'm sure. :)

-- Rowan

Need a book rec

Looking for something dark, twisty, and sexy to read. Little help?

The Jascian's Toy - 14

Chapter 14 of The Jascian's Toy is on my website. You can read it at http://rowanmcbride.com/stories/serials/ .

Hope you enjoy this installment. Remember there's a comment section for the story now here.

Happy New Year!