During my travels this past summer a most bizarre incident occurred. While in LIverpool on the Fourth of July, I wrote a review of the 175th Cunard celebrations on and near the Queen Mary 2. I didn’t like the acrobatic acts in the water in particular and thought they were in poor taste. I’ve written hundreds of reviews, and I didn’t think this one was more notable than the last. But I woke up the next morning to find thousands of mostly negative responses to my review from various people who lived in Liverpool. Apparently my review had been picked up by a tabloid.
I still wondered why all the attention. Then it occurred to me that everyone was talking about my supposed appearance. My Facebook picture isn’t me. It’s my villainess, Helga von Wessel, the femme fatale of the Edward Ware Thriller Series. She took on a life of her own. As a sequel, after the uproar died down a couple of weeks later, I started getting offers from girlie magazines to send them photos. This is the sort of negative attention a villainess would naturally attract. A Hamburg modeling agency published a supposed photo of me. The photo looked suspicously like Helga.
To cap it all off, Facebook reminded me on August 15 that it was her birthday. That was news to me. Helga really was taking an an identity her author never imagined.