Last week, I received the following email, which I have copied and pasted verbatim:
Hey Marilyn – you’re the person responsible for fiscal decisions related to Marilyn M Carr The Foundation, right?
Are you interested in a line-of-credit for your business?
Thanks Marilyn & let me know asap!
Sheri McDaniel
Approvals Director
Starke Business Financing
Of course, I immediately emailed her back and I now have a no fuss, seven-figure line-of-credit! Not.
Aside from the extremely unprofessional way in which I was being pitched a business service that would no doubt have cost me a non-trivial amount of money, and aside from the fact that Starke Business Financing is nowhere to be found on the internet, and aside from the fact that “M” is not my middle initial, and aside from the fact that Sheri has only a passing acquaintance with proper English sentence structure, I found this interesting. I’ll tell you why.
Once upon a time, in an internet long, long, ago, I decided to establish my own website. This was in 2006 when not many average people had a personal web presence, aside from an email address or Myspace profile. But I was determined to start a blog, so first I needed a URL. Naturally, I was hoping for Marilyncarr.com.
In my life up until then, I had barely known any other Marilyns, except my dear aunt for whom I’m named, and one colleague. As for other people with the last name Carr, those were limited to my parents and my siblings. So imagine my dismay when I went to secure the domain name for marilyncarr.com and it wasn’t available.
Next, as one does, I immediately went to visit marilyncarr.com to identify for myself the unicorn of a Marilyn Carr that had somehow beat me to the punch. This Marilyn Carr was an artist with no arms who lived in the U.K. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Except she’d scooped my URL. Dejected, I had to regroup. Then I had a great idea: just use my high school nickname. I also figured that would be a benefit, since nobody except those in-the-know would connect me to my actual identity, should I wish to blog about things my employers might find objectionable. Hence, Marlinee.com was born.
Fast forward to 2019. I was in the last half of my first year of MFA studies, and we were learning about establishing an author “platform.” A platform is not necessarily (or entirely) a web presence, but a platform is your calling card. A platform is the place to which your followers and would-be-readers flock. A platform is where you showcase your writing prowess. A platform is where would-be publishers see dollar signs. Without a platform, you are toast. Or actually, without a platform you won’t ever have any bread to begin with. Literally and figuratively.
This made me think seriously about the fate of Marlinee.com, which had served me well for thirteen years. If I was going to publish under Marilyn Carr, I needed a better way for my presence and writing prowess to be known. I went back to the domain name search facilities, typed in Marilyn Carr and crossed my fingers.
Miraculously, at that point, the Marilyn Carr in the UK had stopped her artistic pursuits or perhaps was no longer inhabiting the earth. I was able to snag the elusive marilyncarr.com! And have had it ever since. So, imagine my indignation when I learned that Marilyn M Carr was somewhere out there, invading my personal internet space.
According to her website, Dr. Marilyn M. Carr is the founder and chairperson of Marilyn M. Carr Ministries and Marilyn M. Carr and Associates, LLC, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is a prolific speaker, a private and public school teacher and administrator, and an ordained minister of the Church of God, Anderson, Indiana. She does indeed have a foundation. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Of course, the next step was to Google myself. Thankfully, the earth was still rotating appropriately on its axis. I (the real Marilyn Carr) popped up on top of the search results. Marilyn M Carr was nowhere to be found. Now all I have to deal with is the Marilyn Carr who’s a professor at York University in Toronto and writes books about sociology that often need to be expunged from my Goodreads page and the Marilyn Carr who’s a teacher-librarian in the Surrey, B.C. school district who is active on X but thankfully does not yet have her own website.
But apparently now I must be more vigilant. Other iterations of Marilyn Carr might be waiting for me to expire and scoop up my hard-won identity. Good luck, I say. The posthumous auction of marilyncarr.com might be worth millions. Please have your lawyer call my cat’s lawyer. Until then, don’t rain on my domain.