Photo Credit: Glyn Lowe Photoworks (Creative Commons Flickr)
I’m not a fan of name-droppers, no. Growing up, I was around plenty of them.
I was raised in the greater Los Angeles area; our semi-rural community was within easy commuting distance of “beautiful downtown Burbank.” Burbank is not glamorous, but it ought to be. Movie and television studios such as Disney, NBC, Worldwide Pictures, and Warner Bros. call Burbank home.
The reason I remember these is because we drove past them to get to my grandma’s. She lived in the Hollywood Hills above Cahuenga and Barham; her living room windows had a view of the famous hillside sign. Not that we cared. We thought that was normal.
What also was normal were the neighbors and friends’ parents who were employed by the studios. These professionals kept their heads down and worked. “Acting is a job, just like any other,” a dad I used to babysit for once told me. (Right there on his mantelpiece, two Emmy statues for sound editing.)
Ah, but their teenage offspring? They name-dropped. After a while, this became tiresome.
Well, now it is my turn. That’s right, I’m dropping some names!
Because Susan Kaye and I were mentioned in Janet Todd’s The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. Seriously, we are in the same paragraph with one of our most favorite writers ever, P.D. James.
It’s our moment of semi-academic fame. Well, as fan fiction writers, anyway. We are smiling as we shake our heads. We are “ebullient and incorrigible spinners-off” of Austen’s novels, ha!
The moral of this story: googling your own name can unearth pleasant surprises. As well as the other kind …
Take a look! This screenshot is from a sample page from Google Books.
This article was also posted at Jane Started It.
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