USA USA!

Oh, I'm no jingoist type and this is not a post about Osama bin Laden (although, I'm not losing any sleep about people celebrating his death and reading blogposts from fellow liberals pearl clutching about those celebrations underscores my deepest dissatisfaction with my own people in that we have the most exhausting tendency to crawl up our own collective ass). Instead this is another post about writing and publishing a book and a solution that came to me to a problem I was having.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have two characters in my book, one named Fred and one named George. They are named for their predecessors in Middlemarch. The problem I was having is that it was hard to distinguish one character from another due to similarities in name and in character.

I was toying with ways to rewrite one or to re-engineer their dialog and was running into a wall when suddenly it hit me that the way around it was simple: George became Jorge. George doesn't have to change much to become Jorge. He's still a cute Midwestern American boy struggling with an unrequited crush. But he doesn't live in provincial 19th century England. He lives in gloriously multicultural America. And so he gets to have Mexican parents.

I'm always glad for American multiculturalism. I'm one that believes that the settling of different nationalities and cultures in this one place is a thing that is not just uniquely American, but one of the best parts of America. It adds richness and texture to American society and can do the same in my little world of The March.

Long before we went completely insane as a nation after 9/11 and xenophobia hit its apex (hopefully), I was bemused and frustrated by the tendency of some white people to freak the fuck out over the potential for our country to become less white. It's weird the way people seemed to feel like white, European roots were a requirement for being a real American. I remember one fellow bemoaning how Spanish would be the national language by 2010; newspapers and textbooks would be written exclusively in Spanish and all the good English speakers would be left in the dust. And this was around 1997! So paranoid. And stupid. Imagine thinking that newspapers would still be a cultural force in 2010.

Jorge will be about the same guy as George. But I get to do some stuff with him to not only distinguish him from Fred (whom I'm also really fond of), but also to open some doors to his character.

Writing is hard. But sometimes something hits you while you're writing and you think, "Of course!" And then it gets to be fun too.