REBRAND: T.S. Ryker

Sawyer is out, Ryker is in, unless you have better

What’s in a name? A lot, actually.

Let me open with - my identity, my brand, my values, are all about human progress and balance with the natural world.

Okay - let’s look a little deeper here.

The year before the bat house, 2022, I was working on a science fiction novel called “The Panstellar Mandate.” Eventually I’ll give more detail on that, but it was coming along well. I had about 140K words out of 220K target.

It was… odd, writing a book about AI beings as AI services were springing up everywhere and the SAG strikes were happening. More on that later too. As such, I had been experimenting a lot with content at the time. Take a listen.

I needed a writer’s name for this. I settled on Sawyer T Penrose.

Why? Sawyer sounded genderless, unbiased, but tough, folksy. Also I live next to “Lake Sawyer,” so it was a connection to an important place in my life. It gives illustration of a rough outdoor-oriented life full of fishing and nature. That part does define me. Go live outside!

Penrose because I was reading Roger Penrose’ book “The Road to Reality.” It is extremely dense. TL;DR however is, he proposed a particle phenomenon called ‘twistors’ at the heart of all field theory. Also he links consciousness to quantum phenomenon and mathematical comprehension, which sounds “woo-woo” until you look at how he frames it. Roger is brilliant.

T is for Tom. Thus, Sawyer T. Penrose…

Then. Baby.

Then. Bats.

At first, I wrote an entire 70K word book, a fiction book, depicting a different family, an adjacent universe family to ours. I featured a character based on my niece as central to the story because I felt a young adult audience would appreciate that perspective.

I called it “She Who Flies With Bats.” Maybe one day I’ll make it available. It wasn’t horrible, but it just wasn’t really my style either. It came together quickly, and I had the time to write it because we had to wait for the bats to leave our house to get started.

Then - real life got way more interesting. The creepy events next door, the demolition work with gigantic live bats, the mountains of turds. Our real story was 1000x more relatable than the kids version.

The problem… I wanted to stick with our real names for the biographic / memoire bit. Yet, I had already bought a bunch of domains associated to “Sawyer.” So I made a pivot.

Sawyer T. Penrose became T.R. Sawyer. Easy peasy. Right?

Well, sure. It rolls off the tongue. “Tom Sawyer” is the character from Mark Twain and everything. It’s a very literary alias to go by. Easy to remember means more attention.

Using my real last name is out. My wife can’t even spell “Riecken.” It also sounds very German and unfriendly, people think “Reich” and infer beliefs that neither I, nor my ancestors ever held.

Here’s a WWI era painting my great-grandfather did lambasting all the leaders of Europe that couldn’t stop a dumb preventable war. (World leaders as gnomes)

Then, recently, I’ve been really trying to think about my values and how those either do or do not show up in my communications. Every word is coded, every name carries either trust or harm. Being inclusive and accepting isn’t enough. Everything needs to be overturned, reviewed, and made better. Being oblivious to something isn’t an excuse.

Enter Mark Twain, and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

What I remember was Tom Sawyer convincing the kids on his street to paint the fence for him. With as much time as I have been wrangling contractors to finish cleaning my attic, this affiliation seemed laughably true.

I also remembered that Tom Sawyer’s friend Huckleberry Finn went on a river adventure with a black man named Jim. Despite the language in that story being vulgar today, the messaging at the time was a humanization of freed slaves, something pivotal to the post-reconstruction south.

For his time, Mark Twain was extremely progressive. He advocated for Frederick Douglas and Beecher Stowe. Twain was also a luminary, he is one of the most celebrated names in American literature.

That’s what I remember.

Yet, as I mentioned, I really want to make sure I’m coding the right message. After searching and re-reading some of the Tom Sawyer stories, I feel it’s best to drop the name.

You see, there are a lot of problematic aspects to Twain’s work. Most notably for me - “Injun Joe.” Despite Twain’s anti-slavery and anti-segregation stance, he depicted America’s first nations as savages full of evil, or lazy beggars. You can read more here:
https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/twain3.html

With that uncovered, I feel I need to drop the name ‘Sawyer.’

I’m not sure yet how I feel borrowing the name ‘Penrose’ yet either. It’s a darn cool name and Sir Roger’s work is foundational to physics, philosophy, math, the concept of free-will… But he’s a contemporary physicist, he’s alive today.

There are plenty of other physicists that would be worth stealing a name from, except that most of them have names that are harder to spell than my own, and plenty of sordid personal lives.

Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Boltzmann Laplace, Strauss, de Broglie. I mean seriously, even Einstein isn’t easy for some folks to spell and he did have a weird relationship with his cousin.

I’m not 100% sure what to do yet. I just needed to take down the “Sawyer” name until I can sort out the direction I want to go. If I try to engage a literary agent or publisher, I want to get the details right.

One of the happiest trips in my life was camping with my wife watching the 2017 on the Warm Springs reservation in Oregon. With students from over seven nations invited, I got to run the telescopes at night and during the eclipse. We did some rad astrophotography too. It was so much fun.

What do you think?

Let me know in the comments. What’s in a name?