Why “Güd Wrtr”?

Well. It’s like this: My best friend, Georgann Turner, had an inspired idea. We were cruising the California State Fair in 1993, tooling around the area where hucksters in chef’s hats wield scary knives, when she decided that we had to stop at the Department of Motor Vehicles booth.

She grabbed a pad with little squares on it begging for seven letters or numbers and began playing around with possibilities for personalized license plates. Before long, she came up with GUD WRTR.

“For you,” she said, pleased with herself.

“I can’t put that on my car,” I protested. “People will think I’m bragging.”

“Not spelled like that,” she said, and she signed me up for GUD WRTR.

When the plates came, I installed them on my Honda Civic, and Georgann declared herself a published writer. I’m another Civic down the road from that one, and the plates still adorn my car. I can’t change them; they’re my BF’s claim to fame as a writer. She’s quite a GUD one, too—and in more than seven letters.

She’s also the person who insisted that I needed my own blog. (She has one, too: emmaswan.wordpress.com.) When we were searching for a name for my blog, this one resurfaced as the obvious choice. Georgann added the umlaut (“because it’s funnier with one”) that the DMV couldn’t.

I’m sure that some people read my license plate and think I’m bragging. But I look at it and think of my best friend, grateful for her faith in me and decades of love and support for everything I do.