This is bad. I have to change my pen name.
It’s been a little over a year of writing on Brunch.
I was curious whether my Brunch link comes up well on Google, so I ran a test.
And when you search for Prodi, other results still come first.
I have never watched One Piece, and I didn’t pick this handle because of a One Piece character.
My handle ‘Prodi’ means “Pro”metheus + “Di”onysus. It’s the names of my two favorite Greek myth characters stuck together.
Prometheus means the one who thinks ahead, and he’s the one who handed wisdom to humans. He’s famous for the story of hanging on a cliff while his liver got pecked out. I picked him because he knew that was coming and made the choice anyway.
Prometheus, Heinrich Füger, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
What I like about Dionysus is that he wasn’t born a full god and still made it into the twelve Olympians on his own ability. I built the handle out of the wisdom and the drive to get better that those two stand for.
So there’s a fair amount of meaning behind the pen name Prodi. There was also a big problem.
It isn’t the cute kind of problem where people mix you up with a cartoon character.
Never google ‘Prodi’
I had no idea, but it turns out the word Prodi has quite a story attached to it.
Apparently there was an incident about ten years ago. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never even studied in the US!
The one bit of luck is that it’s spelled differently from my handle, Prodi, but search in Korean or say it out loud and it’s the same thing.
The problem is that the incident was big enough, and involved enough people, that the related searches look like this.
Not a word search engines are fond of, it seems.
What effort can’t fix
I actually saw these search results a few months ago.
I figured the ranking would shift with time, but there’s no sign of that.
Searching ‘Brunch Prodi’ brings up my stuff fine, but I doubt people will always search that way.
So I held out for a while, then recently decided to change the pen name.
The lesson: search a pen name before you pick it
I thought search results would be easy to move. They weren’t.
I’ll probably change the name, and I honestly haven’t settled on one yet.
So if you have a pen name to suggest, I’d be grateful. (In the comments.)
P.S. The pen name may change, but the writing goes on the way it has. I study ways to get smarter and share them with you once a week. If you’re curious, start with the popular ones: ‘Why I quit my job and started writing’, ‘Speed reading that makes you 10 times faster’, ‘Building a story stronger than a gun’!
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