🧵 World Ender series Part 3
The origins of the character George Greycloud Guess began sometime in the early 2000's. To be honest, my memory of exactly when he became part of the story is hazy, but I can tell you that the influences behind his name and the design of his character came from a personal connection to the Cherokee tribe. Long before the days of genetic testing, when all we had were stories passed down from our grandparents, I was told that same tale that apparently so many others had also been told. A blood relative married a woman from a Cherokee tribe. We had such confidence in that story, that my father believed he was at least 1/16th Cherokee. That would make me at least 1/32nd. Far too minimal a relation to the tribe to be anything other than an interesting connection somewhere in the history of my lineage. A close relative submitted DNA to one of those services and we were all shocked to learn that there was no significant connection that we had been told. Now, if you believe these DNA services are legitimate, that they actually performed the testing and provided true results (there are increasingly more stories where this is cast in doubt), then this lineage is a lie, much like Elizabeth Warren's claims. But if the testing results are a lie, then we may never truly know unless we somehow get additional testing with results that are trustworthy. Even if it is proven without a shred of doubt that no such connection exists, I will never be able to shake the connection I personally made to their history and their culture. I have adopted it into my own history, primarily composed of a Scottish-Irish heritage.
So, that is the origin of this character. He is at first, an homage to what I believed were two sides of my ancestry. I would often imagine the anachronistic merger of cowboys and indians, both expressed in a single individual and landed on the image of a Cherokee man, wearing the garb of an Old West gunslinger. This image drove me to explore this character's backstory and origin and his part in the dramatic change of our current world, into one of total science-fiction fantastical advancement. (more on that in another section)
The name George Guess came from the man who created the Cherokee syllabry. His tribe name was Sequoya. His Christian name, George Guess. You may find it interesting that the Cherokee syllabry was the first developed written language of the Native American tribes. It enjoyed status as the first Indigenous language that shared space in newspapers of the 1800's. (I encourage you to read up on George Guess)
His given tribal name, originated from a personal story in my past. There was a time, between high school and when I met my future wife, when life for me was emotionally very challenging. During that time, everything felt like a fog. I was walking through life inside of a dark cloud. Of course, this is what many people describe as depression, and I'd have to agree. But this wasn't something that I'd given a name until talking with one of those two high school friends who had also gone through a challenging phase of depression in his own life. Being young storytellers, he'd done the introspective work and had given his a name - the black box. Our discussion had inspired me and I'd come to call mine - the Greycloud.
That name didn't just describe a feeling - one that I can recall even today with full clarity - but it also described the work that it took to overcome that feeling, to move past the pain of that era in my life and to cling to the hope of a better and brighter future.
Greycloud's journey, as you may see in "The World Ender" and in the books yet to come, will mirror my own journey that formed the creation of this name.
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