I was irritated that the PW review misspelled your name as “Melissa”. I posted a comment to their forum pointing out the error, in the hopes they could at least fix it on the web. But that doesn’t help the print version…

And no, your novel definitely didn’t get slammed. I think it’s off to a great start.

Oh, well, Melissa is the default everyone goes to with my name. I guess they’re just so amazed with “Snodgrass” that the first name doesn’t matter.

After the age of about eight I never minded my last name. Makes you tough.

For a long time when I was younger I was pretty easygoing about people mangling my name: Ian, Ean, Ion, Jan, Sam, Iran, Eeyore (those are all real mispronunciations, btw– it’s such a common name in other parts of the world but Americans just can’t get it)… And my last name confounds people beyond belief, even though it’s simple. I’ve been acknowledged in books with a misspelled name. I’m amused by that, but in other arenas I’m more militant about correcting people than I used to be, _especially_ in the age of the internet. And I dread how much my name will get misspelled when my own books start coming out. I even worry about it getting misspelled on the cover…

One of the reasons I go with a pen name online (and hopefully, on book covers one day) is the fact my German last name would be misspelled and mispronounced _all_ the time. It also has one of those pesky umlauts.