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.

---

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!

---

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.

---

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? ;)