I sent out a tweet. I've sent out 4152 of them in the last few years, but this one reached an author (one of my favourite Australian authors) who was, at the time, partaking in a 24 hour novel (himself and 8 other Australian authors). Genius I thought, I will send this:
Well, I guess I got a little carried away on the genius bit. I, in fact, did not heed the warnings of one Nick Earls:
The man does not lie. I wasn't careful. 22 hours into their 24 hour write-a-thon, I took a peek at my namesake. Miss Steffi was doing what? Panic set in. The previous warnings were brought to light. I'm pretty sure there was a few minutes where I couldn't breathe. SELF, WHAT DID YOU DO? (the answer: you didn't listen to Nick Earls). So, after several tweets and some breathing into a paper bag (ok, that did not happen), he remedied the situation. I was back to myself and Steffi was going by another name. Thank you!
I took away a few things from the past few hours:
1. Listen to the warnings presented by Nick Earls
2. Perhaps find out the story before lending your name to a novel (more importantly, attempt to avoid this whilst having a name that no one else in the world has)
3. Enjoy the story even more now that you are no longer paranoid a potential boss will stumble upon it.
4. I will likely never have another character named after me, so it's a good thing I saved the chapter Nick wrote with my name in it.
5. I'm pretty grateful to have been a character, even for a very short amount of time. Thanks for the opportunity, Nick! Maybe next time Stef will get paired with Eric Bana... A girl can dream.
Silly Stef (not me--the other one, of course!)
