What’s in a name? It is one of your defining characteristics, so inquiring into its nature should be old hat by now. And it is. But when you have a name or a title, people want to know what it means. Is it a word in a foreign language? (Matthew is Hebrew for Gift of God.) Does it have a greater significance in your life? Or is it just a random collection of syllables that sound good together?

Oletheros is a bastardization of the word for destruction in Greek (olethros in the original). The word is significant because it is how the character of Destruction is first introduced in the comic book Sandman. Until that point in the series, Destruction had been the missing, mentioned but un-named, prodigal brother of the Endless. He had walked out on his life for his own reasons and that whole situation became a major part of the overall Sandman story.

You might have guessed that I was (and still am) a huge Sandman fan. It shouldn’t come as a shock when I let you in on an open secret: I looked to the series for a screen name. I wanted something that would resonate (which it does) and something that sounded good when spoken aloud. The fact that it is also an obscure literary reference is a nice bonus. It’s also fairly easy to remember.

The names of my novels are explained elsewhere (three mouseclicks from here, if you’re feeling adventurous). Take a wild guess what Digital Polaroids are. The Right Click Galleries are easy: open a browser and an image application. Find an image in the one and click your right mouse button (or whatever it is you Mac freaks do). The remainder of the exercise relies on your integrity as honest, law-abiding computer users. You do respect the mighty gods of copyright, don’t you?

The Souvenir Koan is an odd phrase, though. I’ve been asked about it before and it is an interesting story, so here goes.

In April of ’96 (or ’97 – I’m not very good with years. I mean, I know my DOB, graduation year and can calculate most of the rest. Roughly. Look. I knew what year it was then. Isn’t that enough?) It was ’97.

Anyway.

That April, my cousin and I flew to Germany to stay with his brother and his brother’s wife. The wife was stationed in Germany, which is fairly common for US Army types. We three civilians had nothing to do all day for six weeks. I read Excession by Iain M. Banks. My cousin read Sandman. We smoked a lot of pot (the Army base in question was only a four hour drive from Amsterdam). We went sightseeing. We played cards. And I wrote.

I wrote about anything and everything that came across my mind. I had my cousins give me random sentences to serve as paragraph seeds. I let my imagination roam as the neurons got caked in THC and began to collide. I followed the stream of consciousness to the source and discovered it to be a very dry place indeed. I had good phrases but nothing so crude as a story or meaning.

One of these phrases contained the words souvenir and koan, along with their definitions. A koan is an apparently nonsensical phrase. And we all have souvenirs. A phrase that serves as a keepsake has a certain poetic appeal. The word for this in English is, of course, title.

Later, when I got back to the states, I collected my writings from that period and called the mess The Souvenir Koan: An Allegorical Non Sequitur. The phrase does not follow and yet it has meaning. I recycled the best portions of that collection into my first three novels, which left the name hanging. Deciding that it was still a good name, I established this place to collect my organized ramblings for public display and attached the name.

The final name of interest is Roy. Nobody knows this, but my first name is Roy. My father’s first name is Roy, so I go by Matt. Somehow, this makes sense. In turn, my father was named for his Uncle Roy, which means that I am indirectly named after him as well.

There are any number of Uncle Roy stories, but one recent sequence stands out. When his mother died, she left her estate to her grandchildren, skipping my grandfather and his brother entirely. So he and Uncle Roy looted the house.

When my grandfather died, his brother was left without a visible means of support. The will left everything to my father and his siblings. Uncle Roy contested the will, though, on two very unusual premises.

First, he argued that because he and my grandfather had looted their mother’s house, Uncle Roy’s children had been denied their share of the estate. Uncle Roy sued to get his children’s share. (The judge told him, “You realize this opens you up to prosecution from your children, don’t you?”)

Second, Uncle Roy argued that when he declared bankruptcy, he gave my grandfather an amount of money as an undeclared loan so it wouldn’t be seized by his creditors. (“This opens you up to charges of fraud,” the judge told him.)

In the end, Uncle Roy walked away with enough money to keep him quiet and life has gone on.

As namesakes go, Uncle Roy is not the most respectable name in the family. But that happens from time to time. Only rarely are we given the opportunity to choose a name for ourselves. Given the alternative, it can be a big responsibility.

But in the end, they are just random sounds and only occasionally are they real words. In English, at least.