Last week at our Nga Taonga Cluster Teacher Only Day Dorothy Burt challenged the audience to Google themselves occasionally. I couldn’t determine, from the nervous titter, whether many people actually had but here I am ready to say that I regularly Google myself.

And what a fascinating interweb life I have led. The first Google Link finds my website and lists my contact information. There are some old listerv messages about technical issues that I had when I was trying to share our first broadband connection and some pages from when I was classroom teaching and even some nonsense from yet another bout of trying (unsuccessfully) to organise myself GTD style.

I found myself all over the usual social networking culprits. There are lots of pages about me in sites that I haven’t signed up for, judging by the information inside them they are frontends for various database leechers.

And then there is my writing. According to one blog, my

prose is the most beautiful I have ever read – almost a hymn to language.

and another fan of mine says

She writes so poetically and her stories are so sad; about isolation and betrayal. (Chefleur’s Caprice)

Unfortunately not everyone likes my writing quite as much as these two fans. Frewrious Spew said that a book I published in 2004 was rubbish. Jess, writing three years after I published that particular little potboiler, is a little kinder but still said my storyline was silly and that I needed to think less about being risque and more about the relationships I was writing about.

I could make a fairly substantial wager that most of my friends (both in real life and online) didn’t know that I was a writer and had several of my books published. I could also lay good odds on the fact that my Australian heritage would come as a surprise to most people who know me. When I found out it came as a surprise to me too.

Despite what some blogs, newspapers and even one year ten reading list say I am not the writer of The Bride Stripped Bare. The writer of that novel was unmasked as Nikki Gemmell – note the slight difference in speling between Nikki and Nicki?

It’s all a bit silly really and even a cursory check of facts would reveal that I am not a writer of the calibre of my sort of namesake. However, the people who wrote these blog posts, newspaper articles (actually it’s a blog post too) and put together the college reading list all made a simple spelling error. And, that error remains on the internet to be seen for years afterwards.

These errors get picked up my people who come looking for information. Sometimes it’s a child – who puts the wrong information into a school project. Other times it’s adults who don’t cross-check their facts and then make other more damning assumptions.

I am quite happy if people think that I am able to write poetic prose – hymns to language. But what if I wasn’t? And what about the other Nicki / Nikki Gemmell? She might not want to be confused with someone like me.