One of the odd things about being an author is that your name starts turning up in places you didn’t put it. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Sometimes it’s confusing. And sometimes you find yourself wondering whether you have accidentally become somebody else.
It started on a Facebook writing group called The Plot Thickens. They regularly post writing prompts designed to get people thinking, and one of them sparked a story idea for me. I developed the idea a bit and posted it in the comments. A man replied that he really liked what I had come up with and said he would read a book about the subject. Naturally, I was pleased. Writers are simple creatures. Tell us you’d read something we wrote and we immediately perk up like a dog hearing the cheese drawer open.
Then he asked, “Wait... are you the chaos Sandy Davis?”
I stared at the screen. The chaos Sandy Davis? Well, that certainly sounded possible. My book, Between the Fenceposts: Tales of Mud, Mayhem, and Manure, is largely about the chaos of farming and rural life. Sheep escaping, goats making bad decisions, chickens making worse ones, equipment misbehaving, weather refusing to cooperate, even a neighbor who was drunk and naked in the middle of the road, and me standing somewhere in the middle wondering how things got so far out of hand. If there was a Sandy Davis associated with chaos, I had a pretty good claim to the title.
So I replied that if he meant the Sandy Davis who wrote about the chaos of farming and rural life, then yes. Guilty as charged.
That seemed to settle it. Then he told me that someone had given a friend of his my book, but she hated reading and was going to send it along to him. Now I was thrilled. This is what authors hope for. One person gets a book, another person hears about it, and the book gets passed along. No advertising campaign. No carefully designed marketing plan. Just a book finding its way from one person to another. Grassroots readership. I ended our exchange by telling him to let me know how he liked the book.
And that should have been the end of it.
Except I still didn’t know what he meant by “the chaos Sandy Davis.” The phrase kept rattling around in my head. Was that how somebody had described me? Had I been mentioned somewhere? Was there a review I hadn’t seen? Had I somehow acquired a nickname without being notified?
Curiosity eventually got the better of me, so I did what any sensible person does when confronted with a mystery in the twenty-first century. I Googled myself. More specifically, I Googled “chaos Sandy Davis.” And there she was. Another Sandy Davis has a podcast called Chaos to Calm. I sat there looking at the search results for a minute. Well. That was unexpected. Apparently there really was a Chaos Sandy Davis, and it wasn’t me.
Now I had a problem. Had this man mistaken me for the podcast Sandy Davis? That certainly seemed possible. But then what about the book? His friend had supposedly been given a Sandy Davis book and was going to send it to him. Except, as far as I could determine, the Sandy Davis behind Chaos to Calm hasn’t written a book.
Back to Google I went, and that was when I discovered there are quite a few of us. Sandy Davis. Sandra Davis. Authors writing in various genres. I even found a Sandra Davis who had written fiction involving chaos, which did absolutely nothing to clarify the situation. Instead of solving the mystery, I had expanded the suspect list.
I began to feel as though I had stumbled into a literary version of To Tell the Truth. Will the real Sandy Davis please stand up? Except I was already standing, and apparently so were several others.
The more I thought about the original conversation, the stranger it became. He had asked if I was “the chaos Sandy Davis.” I had assumed he meant the chaos I write about. He may have meant the podcast. Then he mentioned a book. I assumed he meant mine. He may have assumed the podcast woman had written it. His friend may actually have Between the Fenceposts, or she may have a completely different book by a completely different Sandy or Sandra Davis. It was entirely possible that every one of us had been having a different conversation while believing we were all talking about the same person.
There is something wonderfully human about that. We hear a familiar name, recognize enough of the details to make them fit, fill in the missing pieces ourselves, and keep right on going. I didn’t question “chaos” because chaos fits me perfectly well. He apparently didn’t question the book because he already had Sandy Davis filed away somewhere in his mind. Between the two of us, we may have constructed an entirely separate identity out of perfectly reasonable assumptions.
The best part is that the story isn’t over yet. His friend is supposed to send him the book. Eventually a package may arrive, he may open it, and Between the Fenceposts may be inside. If so, mystery partly solved. His friend really did have my book, although I still won’t know exactly how I became connected with Chaos to Calm in his mind.
On the other hand, he may open the package and discover a completely different book written by a completely different Sandy Davis. I hope he remembers our conversation if that happens, because I asked him to let me know how he likes the book. At this point, I really, really hope he does.
Until then, I seem to be faced with three possible endings.
Behind Door Number One, his friend really does have Between the Fenceposts, and somewhere along the way he simply confused me with the Sandy Davis who hosts Chaos to Calm.
Behind Door Number Two, his friend has a book by some other Sandy or Sandra Davis, and neither of us was talking about the same person from the beginning.
And behind Door Number Three, the package arrives, he opens it, stares at the cover, and thinks, “Who in the world is this woman, and why is she talking about manure?”
At this point, I’m not ruling out anything. I only know one thing for certain. Somewhere out there is another Sandy Davis helping people move from chaos to calm. I may even need to tune in sometime when I’m having a particularly chaotic day. And, somewhere up here in northern New Hampshire is a different Sandy Davis who seems to have spent a lifetime proving that calm is highly overrated.
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