Jonathan Stokes: My name is Jonathan W. Stokes and it is pronounced Jonathan W. Stokes. Why the W, you may ask? Sounds a little pretentious. Well, when I first became a writer and joined the Writers Guild, there was already a Jonathan Stokes in there. Several, in fact. So I needed to add a middle initial.

So the country of England is lousy with John Stokes's. You turn over a manhole cover and John Stokes's come crawling out. There are millions of us. If you were to go to London and time travel to when they had phone books, you'd find that about half the London phone book is nothing but John Stokes's.

So I needed a middle initial. My W stands for Witty of all things. My middle name is an Ellis Island-ism. It is an Americanization of Witkowski. My ancestors fled the cossacks in Russia, fled centuries of oppression and pogroms in order to come to America to become mid-level insurance executives and accountants.

As for the last name Stokes, that last name is 1,000 years old. Adam de Stokke was the first Norseman in my lineage to come over in 1066 from Norsemandy to England. The reason why we can trace our English lineage back 10 centuries is because the English are so fastidious about keeping good tax records.