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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I am a fan of the John Carter of Mars series of books. I’m one of those fans who read all of the books I could get my hands on, not just the first one or two. And of course I went to see the movie that came out not long ago. I loved it. And I have to admit that it influences my writing. One of the ways it influenced me is something John Carter himself said in one of the books. He mentioned that he was basically immortal, and had been as long as he remembered. Going to Mars did not give that to him. He’d simply always been around, watching family and friends grow old and die. He was the perpetual Uncle John to generation after generation of children and had been as long as he remembered.

When I started writing my Captain Jack of Harts series, I imagined him having a similar Uncle John. My older notes even have the guy listed as Uncle John, but I didn’t name him in the stories I wrote. And John or derivatives of that name are VERY common in Jack’s family tree. Heck, his first name is a derivative, just as is father’s name is. Most generations of his family have a John of some kind in them, and yes, I have plotted out his family tree going way back to the 1900s at least. I’m a detailed little planner like that, and sometimes years go by between me leaving a little hint in one story and that hint becoming a major point in others. The man who would become Captain William Carter went through just that kind of years’ long growth as a concept and a character before he ever saw print.

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