Last night, I got an email that caught me off-guard. It was from the owner of a recently-opened Etsy store with no sales thus far. It both polite and yet mindbogglingly ballsy.

Let me paraphrase.

"Hi! I chose this name for my business because no one else has it. I saw that you also use the name. Change the name, please? I don't want our customers to be confused!"

Now, once before, shortly after opening my shop, I made a stupid mistake. When I first started doing my Sylvan Leaves in 2008, I didn't know they were going to be a staple in my Autumn and Winter lines, 'cause my shop had just opened. I called them "Enchanted Leaves," 'cause that's what popped into my brain at 2am or whenever I wrote the copy on too-little sleep (the state in which I ALWAYS write copy). I got a polite message from someone whose shop was called Enchanted Leaves, informing me that she also had an electroplated leaf line. Though our finished work looked different, she asked if I could please change my naming convention so there would be no confusion between our shops.

And I did. She got there first. She had every right to ask. It taught me a pretty valuable lesson-- Google is your friend. Myths and fairy tale references are one thing-- everybody has the right to those-- but it never hurts just to check if you're stepping on someone else's toes before you launch a line.

In this instance, however? I've been using "The TimeKeeper's Daughter" since 2008 to name my steampunk line. If she had done even the most cursory of Google searches, she'd have seen that, since my work pops up first in a search.

When I began to use the name in 2008, freshly imbued with the reminder to Google, no other jewelry artist was using it. There was a novella (I think?) self-published that used a similar name, but that was it. As I wasn't basing my work on that work and they were in different commercial arenas, no harm no foul, no IP infringement. I called my work "The TimeKeeper's Daughter" because, as some of you might remember, the early pieces came with short stories attached. About a watch maker's daughter who discovered some magical clocks in her father's workshop.

Since my line has gotten some attention in the steampunk community, I'm not surprised to see that the name has popped up in some self-pubs and on DeviantArt. I market within that community, and it's not unlikely that the name wormed its way into the back of someone's brain when it came time to title somethingorother. Again, they're not based on my work, and they're in different commercial areas. No big. The only thing that has been based on my work has been a bath and body line by Fantasy Bath, and that was with full permission.

So, no. The claim that "no one else was using it" is patently false, and stupidly easy to prove so. I will not be altering my own names in any way, other than to add "THE ORIGINAL" to the listings with a quick note that my line, established in 2008, is in no way affiliated with this brand new company who decided to use it.

As always, support originality in art, check to see whose idea it was first (which is super easy on Etsy via sales histories), and accept no substitutes.

And if they persist, I will find a way to make sure a blog post on the matter is the first thing that pops up every single time someone Googles "Timekeeper's Daughter."

Goodness people. GOOGLE IS YOUR FRIEND.