Curiousity killed the googler

Google is scaring me as of late. I googled myself today and I've been pretty good about my name online except in one particular location and I've been trying to get that cleared off; the good thing about that site is that it has a broken link back to my old Geocities site so I doubt that they would be able to find this particular site and associate it with me. Still, it does give me a bit of pause when I think about how powerful a tool google is. It's one thing if you're an academic or just having a hobby page; this whole fanfic thing is still woefully misunderstood and considered a waste of time and generally not something worth doing.

While I'm not really writing anymore, I'm not ashamed or embarassed by anything I've written either. It's just that I don't want to be judged by a hobby before someone even meets me and evaluates my skills and personality. I claim to be a professionally published writer and editor which is true and I have the clips/magazines to prove it. However, my concern is that if an employer stumbles on this website, they will automatically invalidate what I've done professionally and instead, place judgement on my skills as a writer based on my fanfic, if not make a value judgement about me. One could argue that the quality of my writing should be inherent in the fanfic itself, but then one must also be able to overlook the 'oddness' of fanficcing in the first place.

There are allegedly, according to various media publications, at least half a million people writing fanfic out there (we're not talking about the ones who actually make the shelves of Barnes & Noble). Many more people read. I remember being startled when a classmate mentioned an X-Files fanfic to me that was listed as a WiP on The Haven and she asked me about it. I hadn't read it as I don't read WiPs, but I had heard of it and had read other stories by that particular author. I think I mumbled something incoherent back to her. I suspect now that this person is an Alias ficcer but in a conservative school and in an MBA program, I wasn't going to shout out my knowledge of what's what in Trek and X-Files. My suspicions were confirmed when she started using fanficky terms with me and I kept thinking, "One of these days, she's going to trip me up..."

Since I can't seem to get the author of that other website to remove my name (she seems to have gone AWOL), my only hope that anyone who stumbles across it will think it was a passing fad and I didn't continue on. Everything else that turns up in my real name is completely legitimate and above-board (and I hate the fact that here I'm implying that fanfic is not a legitimate form of writing or even a worthwhile endeavour). It's just the one slip-up that I'm concerned about (Sarah, on the other hand, is convinced that Pocket Books is going to stumble across this site and hire me one of these days; if only she was right). What I do in my free time has no bearing on anything I accomplished professionally; I'm just not sure that the advent of google makes that distinction clear.