Who shares your name?

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Work commitments mean I don’t have time to write a real post, but don’t leave in despair yet.

I was reading Janet Reid’s blog recently, and I came across this delightful post in which a writer freaks out about sharing her name with a writer with a strong web presence who pens lousy poetry and is vocal online about her political views.

(If you’re worried, read the post. Agents know this happens and are prepared to put in the small amount of work required to discover that you are a different person to writer crazy-pants.)

I imagine such situations are common.

Years ago, it came to my attention that my legal name was also the name of a German porn star. Putting my name into a Google images search was quite an education.

On the positive side, the other me was incredibly hot, which was obvious beause she never felt the urge to hide behind many clothes.

This was a minorly embarrassing situation. It was more embarrassing because I had recently started working, and the person who made the discovery was my boss.

Who else do you come up with when you Google your name? The people need to know!

Author: A.S. Akkalon

By day, A.S. Akkalon works in an office where the computers outnumber the suits of armour more than two-to-one. By night, she puts dreams of medieval castles, swords, and dragons onto paper.

17 thoughts on “Who shares your name?”

  1. I get an herbalist (who writes about natural medicine I don’t always agree with) and a sex therapist. A domain speculator owns my name as a domain… and wants about 700 dollars for it!

    1. A herbalist and a sex therapist is not too bad a haul, as long as you don’t get misdirected emails from people asking for advice on their sex lives.

      Geez, that’s a pretty optimistic domain speculator!

  2. Apparently (and thankfully) the other Diana Peach was an English Olympic figure skater in the 40’s. I can live with that 🙂 My poor daughter shares a name with a porn start too. 🙂

  3. The picture confused me at first. Now I get it and that’s hilarious. Bet that was a fun conversation with the boss, probably one he probably had to okay with HR first. “Hey, did you know you share your name with a German porn star?” isn’t exactly the best thing to say over coffee… at work… to your new employee…

    David Shank is a fairly common name if you google it. It takes a while to even find me. I wrote about it actually in my Death to Digital Squatters post. Those leeches want $800 for the rights to davidshank.com…

    So glad for middle names.

    1. At least this didn’t happen until after I had the job and my boss had a sense of humour. 🙂

      Yep, digital squatters suck. I read recently that you shouldn’t do a domain search for your name until you’re ready to buy it, because there are people who track these things and then buy the domains, hoping you’ll want them in the future.

      1. I’m pretty sure that’s actually what happened. I remembered when I discovered who.is and name.com and I decided to look up my name and found that davidshank.com was available. I might have searched more than once, always paranoid that some other David Shank would pick it up. Then one day it was no longer available. Wish I’d gotten the same advice as you, back then.

        1. That sucks. I agree – it’s not common advice, and it should be. I’ve been reading about such things for a long time and only just stumbled across it. Great that you could find a sensible solution.

  4. I also have a rather common name. Hence, deciding to go by Brian Donald Wright. The spookiest thing about googling my name are all of the things I find that actually are me….

    1. Ooh, you’re a lawyer specialising in complex business litigation, an ophthalmologist, a Republican, a commercial refinisher (because people can never finish things right the first time), and some crazy writer guy. Wow, it’s creepy what you can find about people online. I’m going to stop before I start feeling like a stalker.

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