SETH W. JAMES

Y the W

November 11, 2022

By Seth W. James

In relaunching my author website and updating my book covers, I had the opportunity to return to my original byline of Seth W. James, restoring the W after many years of absence.  It had been my intention while penning my first novel to include my middle initial, if for no other reason than to help disambiguate which is my first name and which is my last.  Despite the widespread familiarity with actor Brion James, author Henry James, and outlaw Jesse James—to name only three of the many notable Jameses—I’ve been Mr. Seth’d on numerous occasions and, with resignation, have answered to James simply to extricate myself from those apparently unfamiliar with Seth as a first name.  (I really ought to see if Seths Green, Meyers, and Rogen want to start a union; The International Society for the Heightening of Awareness that Seth is a Given Name; bit of a mouthful, really.)

During the last years of the 1990s, however, I was busy writing my first novel—an impenetrable crime noir masterpiece, so dense that even I couldn’t understand it, reading it many years later—when one of former President George Herbert Walker Bush’s sons decided to enter the next election: to disambiguate himself a bit from his father, he went by George W. Bush.  Damn it.  I was leery at that point of including my W, as it might give the wrong impression that I shared more than an initial with a fascist who, even before the election had begun, had indicated his intention to invade Iraq.  After the Supreme Court appointed him President and he stumbled his way to a response to the awful events of September the eleventh—a response that included torture, disinformation, and war—and with those praising or lambasting his crimes, foibles, and general incompetence referring to him often simply as W, I thought it best to quietly remove my middle initial before embarking on my writing carrier.  So, after rewriting my first novel four times—to ensure no one could possibly understand it—I sent it off to literary agents simply bylined with Seth James.

With worse dictators and their enablers having taken the stage since, and with no punishments having been applied the Ws of yesterday—ensuring, as we now see, that no crime is out of consideration and that the terrorists of the Republican Party will stop at nothing to destroy the United States of America—the country seems to have largely forgotten George.  I understand he spends his time painting, now; I would have thought wallpaper would have been more apropos, but nevertheless.  And so, as I gear up for my next literary salvo, focusing on the issues of climate change and inequality, painting my own pictures of the future, wherein Earth’s ability to sustain human life has waned while oppression has waxed, I have reaffixed my W.  A terribly minor point from a terribly minor author, perhaps, but it is my name.  And so, it is with my full name that I’ll see you on the bookstore shelf, I hope, and we’ll wander together through a troubled future.

Seth W. James