My invisible web site

If I was going to try and hide my personal web site, I couldn't have done it better.

You would think, wouldn't you, that 'lobsterism' would be a fairly unique bit of meta data? The Lobster Church? Midwest Rock Lobster? This struck my peers as so outre when I was in school that I was called 'Lobster' years later by people I didn't know name-to-face.

Yet, when I try to Google myself, I can scarcely find myself.

No, I didn't get some geocities piggy-back URL to host my site. I registered the domain and bought two years of hosting for it. Not really because I wanted to develop Midwest Rock Lobster, but because as long as I needed the hosting space, why not create a web site?

Plus, with the book I'm working on, whether I get an agent to sell it to a Big Six house, get an indie house (I'd love to be picked up by MacAdam/Cage) to put it out or, unlikely, I self-published it, I'm the only one on earth who would want to promote 'Wealth Effects' as much as me.

So when it comes out, I aim to have my site be something that bookish types already frequent. Then I can exploit them.

I hear of people being published by big New York publishing houses who seem to want to keep the release a secret. Maybe to be able to write off a lose to counter the obscene profits they've made of another tired John Grisham/Stephen King/Dan Brown/Clive Cussler book. Maybe because they want to be able to see a pulse before they provide life support.

In any case, the idea is that when 'Wealth Effects' hits the street, be in a position to promote it using the Internet, be accessible to whatever 'fans' it might attract, etc. Plus, I have this jones for writing literary criticism that I know would never get published. 'Does Phineas Dream of Electric Sheep' got bumped to Will Christopher Baer's front page for a minute, but I'm not dumb enough to think I'd ever make money off my opinions on Orwell's lesser-known books or the relationship between Hašek, Orwell, and Heller.

Or between Orwell and Huxley, Vonnegut, Palahniuk, and Max Barry.

For that matter, I see connections between Terry Souther's 'The Magic Christian' and Edward Abbey's 'The Monkey Wrench Gang.' I see connections between Faulkner's pre-Sartoris work and the two novels Joey Goebel as produced.

I see connections between Kafka and David Sedaris.

But when I Google, casting about for my site, the best I come up with in top hits is a message board where my site is part of my signature. I tried to join some web rings, whatever they are, added the code required (when I could figure it out) and I'm still invisible.

If I could hide this well from bill collectors...