Google Fu

I had grand intentions of getting up a funny spoof post dealing with the trials and tribulations of my trying to write this love scene, but it’s not finished yet (neither is the scene), so I’m talking about other things today.

No, what I’m thinking about is my CP, Pot.  Now Pot and I talk a lot.  Well to varying amounts when she goes through rounds trying to wean herself from her internet addiction (I’m too far gone, so I don’t bother).  But in any event, we do talk often through GoogleTalk which is, I have to say, one of my favorite programs out there.  Not because it has any kind of fabulous interface or because it’s got great emoticons or imvironments.  But because it automatically saves (unless you tell it otherwise) a transcript of every conversation you have in your Gmail account.

Why is this so awesome?  How often do you really want to remember something you said in the inanities of online conversation?

When you have the kind of creative relationship we do–it’s often.  And not necessarily recently enough that you can narrow down what it was and when.

Take last night for example.  She emails me asking if I remembered a song I’d linked her to on YouTube–and then described the video she remembers.  Pot is very big on getting inspiration from song lyrics–it’s a cool process to watch as it isn’t at all how I work.  So I hop up to see if she remembers anything else.  Apparently doing a google search from within Gmail on youtube as part of a link didn’t narrow it down too much.  I actually didn’t remember a thing about the conversation she was referencing and went to bed.  Sometime after that she managed to actually find it.  The Google Fu is strong with this one.  Ironically, it was in a conversation from back in JANUARY.  No wonder I didn’t remember.

But seriously, it is a fantastic feature to have, particularly when you have literally thousands of conversations to sift through.  We have what I have come to realize is a very unusual relationship as crit partners.  We are not merely beta readers “hey here’s mine, let me read yours” kind of deal.  We talk about virtually every aspect of our work–not in a write by committee kind of way, but in a soundingboard kind of way.  We each know virtually everything there is to know about each other’s worlds.  So if I make a reference to the alley attack in Glasgow when Conall was 16, she knows exactly what I mean.  I have yet to find anyone else even remotely close to that kind of awesome.  In any event, we’ve generated a lot of ideas between us, and I really adore being able to search and find them.

This is also particularly handy if you do Character Interviews (which we do).  Ideally you’d actually put this into a Word file where it’s easily found, but it doesn’t always happen that way.  With GoogleTalk transcripts, you have it in perpetuity.  Even if your computer meets Armageddon.  How cool is that?