Become.Com

A couple weeks ago, I got an email from a young woman named Emma Trotter, who wanted to feature my blog on www.become.com (which is a comparative shopping website - one of the top such websites on the Internet). Turns out, Emma wrote her thesis on Sherman Alexie's work, and had the impression that my work had some similarities - or at least was about the same region of the country. For anyone who doesn't know, Sherman Alexie is a writer from just north of here - and I think he went to high school in Spokane - who has wonderful, funny, poignant work, including "Smoke Signals," "The Business of Fancydancing," and "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven" (my favorite title). He is Native American, which flavors his writing. We both have a "magical realism" style (where the extraordinary can be seen in the ordinary, is perhaps a good way to describe it). Having someone use my name and his in the same sentence was quite a compliment. And then she wanted to write about my blog too.

Here we are, two weeks later, and voila! Emma has been true to her word. On the "pocketbook change" section of become.com, there is now a feature blog entry on Accidental Rabbit Trails (or ART, for short). (The article is currently linked on the front page too, probably just for the day though - www.become.com). I love the color she used to frame the photo. (Oh, and some of you may recognize the photo as Taryn Hecker-Thompson's work, from www.pricelessnotpricey.com - she did my photo shoot in January - this is one of the photos she took.)

Become.com is ranked one of the top ten deal-tracking shopping sites on the web. (In fact, in this survey in PC Magazine, it was ranked number one out of the ten because of its AIR technology - "Affinity Index Rating." As the article says, "In layman's terms, the [AIR] service is capable of crawling through buying guides, expert reviews, articles, product specs, forums, merchants, and other useful information available on the Web" and apparently gets you to a wide variety of products based on price and quality without requiring you to be the informed one.) "Pocket Change" is a segment of become.com and is intended to give more specific advice to shoppers about what's out there, blog-wise and otherwise. I'm excited to have ART featured on the site!

And the process of getting there was interesting. Emma had me answer a series of questions, about what my background is, what my writing exercises are, what advice I'd give to aspiring writers... It was interesting to put my thoughts down on paper about those topics, and then to see how Emma was able to condense that all into a concise review. So, a great process all around. Check out the feature and keep the become.com link among your favorites.

Here's the photo part of Emma's article - nice colors, right?