Jack of Harts

A year or three ago I was hearing rumors of a new press that was doing good jobs with short story anthologies. Raconteur Press. Looking at their open calls made me interested, so I asked around. Everyone said they were good. So I decided to write some weird west stories for them.

Now I couldn’t use Jack because it was before his time. I couldn’t use his last name because it was a moniker given to him, and I couldn’t use the last name he grew up with because his father was the first to wear that name and there is a real reason for that. If I wanted to write stories back in the 1800s, I needed either a totally new name and an old one. Enter the Carters, the established name of his extended family. Also enter the Uncle John that Jack remembered getting into all the kinds of trouble that uncles help you get into that would absolutely horrify good and proper moms. But I’m not going to write a series of weird west stories where the protagonist is named John Carter, and may one day go to Mars.

So I looked for baby names on the internet and found one that worked. It’s a name with a ring to it. Not too long as to be unwieldy. Not one of the big six Biblical names, but definitely a Christian name with a lot of history to it. I could see even a Puritan giving a fourth or seventh son a name like that. And so Captain William Carter came out of the pages of backstory and notes into the real world of publishing.

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