Names

[gwynhefar]

About 95% of the results you get when you google "Gwynhefar" are me. The rest refer primarily to a blurb about Mists of Avalon that misspelled the character's name in the book (I admit, in fact, that that misspelled blurb is where I got my particular spelling variant of the name, although the book was not the inspiration for taking the name), an apparent short story by Mercedes Lackey I've never read, and a handful of other random people who have the audacity to use what I've already claimed.

I had no idea I'd created quite that large an internet footprint. And that's only the ones where I used the full "Gwynhefar" name. The google results for "Gwyn Raven" are a bit more ambiguous, due to the aforementioned Lackey's unfortunate use of the hyphenated last name Gwyn-Raven for her psychic dynasty, something that, in fact, interfered quite a bit with my enjoyment of the series when I read them, since I had already been using the name Gwynhefar Raven for quite some time before I got around to reading Lackey's books, and to see what I already considered *my* name popping up on every other page was quite distracting.

Comments

[just-the-ash.livejournal.com]

Imagine how disturbed I was to see anybody using "Gwyn" in any other context but me, after a lifetime of correcting misspellings! And now you do that Google meme where you search for "Gwyn says" or "Gwyn needs" or what have you, and the "Gwyn" in question is likeliest to be "-eth Paltrow."

[gwynraven.livejournal.com]

Oh I know! It was odd for me to have another friend named Gwyn, particularly with a raven fetish *g* And I am *always* correcting people who want to call me Gwen. Drives me nuts.

I actually started using Gwyn after finding a baby name book that gave Gwenhwyfar as the antecedent of Jennifer and reading Cynthia Voight's Jackaroo (in which the main character was named Gwyn) in the same month. I loved the name Gwyn, and it was close enough to an alternate form of my legal name, which I hated. I used Gwynhwyfar for a short while, but I didn't like the double 'y' and then when I saw the Gwynhefar spelling I decided to go with that.

And that was almost 15 years ago. So now it's pretty well established :)

[gwynraven.livejournal.com]

Oh, and it's always odd to see your tattoo icon as well, since that's *my* tattoo :) I really need to get someone to take a decent picture of mine so I can make an icon of it and then we can *really* confuse people *g*

large internet footprint

[harkalark.livejournal.com]

Well, you know what they say about gals with big feet...

Re: large internet footprint

[gwynraven.livejournal.com]

:-P