I haven't blogged for a while, but the events of yesterday warrant a post if ever something did. Yesterday I watched and waited, along with billions of people, to find out who the next pope would be. As a historian, I have perhaps an unusual appreciation for the conclave, as the basic workings of selecting a pope have not changed for almost 750 years. Watching the proceedings allows us bystanders a chance to feel as if we have gone back in time to the Middle Ages. Yes, the new pope sent out a tweet announcing his election soon after, but that was not the first we heard of it. We saw white smoke emerge from the Sistine Chapel, the same signal Romans would have seen in the 1300s announce a new leader of the Catholic Church. It was an experience we could share with generations upon generations of fellow human beings, and I think it is a brilliant example of keeping a time-honored tradition in a shifting and slipping modern world.

What made this event personal for me, however, was not the pomp and circumstance, nor the wondrous news that the new pope was both the first Jesuit and the first non European (although his father is, technically, an Italian immigrant, so there are strong ties there). No, the amazing part of this story for me is that he changed his name to Pope Francis. Popes have taken on new names for centuries and centuries. We just had Benedict XVI, and not one of them was actually named Benedict. But no one had ever taken the name Francis. Until now.

So, why is this important? We have a character in our book, Hade's Gambit, that is named Francis DeSolei. He is a vain, pompous, evil man, who uses his connections to rise up within the Catholic Church in order to pull it down in the last days and set himself upon the thrown. In the end of our book, he has succeeded in taking over the church in America, and calls himself Pope Francis. Yeah. Yikes. In our second book, the Rise of Cain, coming out hopefully this summer, Pope Francis becomes a true menace to the world. He refuses to repent, and continues to make a mockery of God and everything religious. We are not trying to frame the Catholic Church as a bad organization at all, as we all have a healthy respect for the church and know many wonderful members. Our point is to show that evil people can pull down good things if given the chance, and that this is what happens with Francis. He infiltrates a good organization and corrupts it for his own power and wealth.

So, last night and this morning we have had numerous conversations about how to proceed with this. People have already ordered copies of the book after finding out about this, and I'm sure in the near future we might have some people who refuse to read our books due to this. Do we change the character's name in book two, do we ignore this, do we put a disclaimer in the beginning of the book? Clearly, we named him this last year in a book already published, and as there had never been a Pope Francis before (we even checked!), we didn't think this would ever be a situation we would run into. And yet here it is, and we have run right into it and smacked our heads.

I think beyond the immediacy of this situation, however, this raises some great points in general about how to write a book. Even the best laid plans can sometimes go astray. We have given names to hundreds of characters in our books to this point (yes, they are big books), and you always cross your fingers and hope that you won't run into any problems. We have such names as Petr Zhugravinsky, David Livingston Sumbawanga, and Callithrix Aurita Williams (otherwise known as Marmoset). As an author, you give your characters names you believe they could have, and in a sense they become like your children in that regards - you have helped create them and helped give them their identity. But, they are not real, they live in a make-believe world, and their interactions with the real world is generally only limited to how those who read about them interpret and think about them.

So, what happens when a character you have becomes intertwined in this way, though a name, with a very real person? Unfortunately this goes against one of my personal rules about writing - never do anything that brings the person out of the story. A writer should never add or include anything that will take the reader out of that world they have created. Having a character do something wildly out of their personality, screwing up the time-space continuum, including information that is inaccurate, false, or just plain wrong, or any one of a dozen of other examples, pulls the reader out of the story. They say: "that isn't how someone would really say that in Italian," or "that isn't how a retinal scan really works," or "that isn't where Circus Circus is on the Las Vegas strip" and all of these are things that pull a reader out of the story. And yes, those are all things we had to ask ourselves about and research for our book to make sure we got them right. 

So, the question becomes, what does having a Pope Francis in our book do in this situation? Does it pull the reader out? Does every time someone comes upon his name, will they lose track of the story and begin to think about how our character relates to the real Pope? From what I have already read about the new pope, I think it is safe to say that our Pope Francis could not possibly be more different from the real Pope Francis. He is a compassionate reformer, someone who cares for children, is a strong purporter of the traditions of the church, gave up living in a mansion and rides the bus to work. Ours is ruthless, despises the people he is to watch over, and cares more for filthy lucre than anything else. 
So, what to do? We'll figure it out short term how we want to progress with this. Long term, though, we are going to keep writing, keep creating, and hoping our books find a wide market. These are the sort of unexpected twists and turns that make writing so interesting and so much fun. I have to say, though, of everyone I thought could possibly help us get our books out into the world, I never thought it would be the Catholic Pope. You can't make this stuff up, which is why life is so wonderful. I'll try to add another post here in a few days to let you know where we decided to go with all of this.