What’s in a Name? [Pt. 1]

I was enjoying the dubious honor of teaching English to Vallejo freshmen when, while getting ready one morning, a national news program featured a fellow word warrior from somewhere in the Midwest who had been fired when it was discovered that she had the temerity to have been writing Harlequin romances on the side.

Now, let us just set aside the injustice of high school teachers having to do anything else besides the insanely demanding job listed on their CV, and let’s hope that the woman in question was writing for the same reason the rest of us do: she had to, or burst.

Let’s look instead at the shortsightedness of a corn-fed school board deciding that they didn’t want someone, and I fight the impulse to use all caps here, who had actually written and published books to teach their children how to (checking notes)… write.

I have never had the pleasure of reading a Harlequin, but as a kid who devoured Stephen King, William S. Burroughs, and Charles Bukowski, I am fascinated to know how much damage the board thought a formulaic romance might inflict on a young, impressionable mind. (We aren’t going to mention Clive Barker here as there may have been some actual scarring from those stories, although nothing some Richard Brautigan didn’t smooth over.)

My point being, one would be hard pressed to find someone who had been driven to a life of debauchery and indulgence from something they read, and if they had, good for them. Given that I was working on my first novel at the time, however, and considering the amount of sex, drugs, and… Sasquatch it contained, I started thinking that a nom de plume, might be called for, perhaps even a nom de guerre.