Jack of Harts

Sliding Captain William Carter into real history is fun. I just have to craft the stories in a way that makes it seem realistic that he is never publicly reported on. The modern internet and social media makes that a rather more complicated thing, so I don’t know if I’m going to write him past the 1990s. Certainly nothing has caught my attention yet. Two centuries of real life history and constant news reports and archives that can be searched gives me a great deal of interesting what ifs to write a story about.

And if I can educate the reader about a place and time in American history while telling them a fun story at the same time, why not do that? Give the modern reader a glimpse of the time when you put coins in a slot in a public phone to call a State away while talking to the operator. Give them a glimpse of the arcades their parents went to. The wars their grandparents fought in.

Or the railroad strike that nearly shut the nation down in 1877. What was it really? Well, I plan to answer that question in one of my stories. And did you know there was a Hessian weather god influencing the Siege of Savannah to keep the French troops lost all night in the swamp beneath the city? There are so many places and times I can slip something mysterious into real history and show the reader what “really happened that night.” It is rather fun.