Just yesterday, I received an email from a high school student a couple of counties away, asking me… Well, I can’t simply call it my most-asked question. It is also one of the most common complaints about Cascadia Fallen I’ve seen in the Amazon reviews. The youngster’s email is polite and inquisitive, but the review complaints on this topic generally sound something like this:
“I couldn’t stand how he changed all the local names! It would’ve been a good book, but I just couldn’t get past it! So I’m only giving it 2 Stars!”
Here’s several truths. Take your pick.
- I made a mistake. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know that I didn’t even know, if that makes sense. The same thing applies to using a pen name: I saw other authors doing it, so I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. There was this silly notion about keeping anonymity in my mind.
- “Creative License.” Now, there’s some validity to this. A more accomplished mystery author who lives here in Kitsap County disclaims in the front of every book a statement similar to this: “While I use real settings and locations, at time I need to make small changes for the good of the story.” I get that. I may start doing it myself. It seems silly, but when someone says, “I went and checked that Safeway. There’s no water spigot on the outside of it like you said in the book” (true story)—it can surprise you a bit. For Book 2 of the upcoming Echoes of the Just series, I used a real location in eastern King County, and then created the characters an enemy at a totally fictitious location a mile away. But to the point—if I used all fictional names for Kitsap County in the Cascadia Fallen trilogy…. Do you REALLY know where I was talking about…?
- The Navy. Originally, I had a more “techno-thriller” plan for the naval sub-plot in Tahoma’s Hammer. I wanted to melt-down a submarine reactor. Eventually, a Beta reader who was a reactor operator talked me out of it. But by then, I’d already fictionalized the shipyard, the county, and my pen name. See, the Navy has an ego problem, and it infects their civilian leadership just as badly as it does most of the officers. They HATE when people did something without asking permission first. Former SEAL “Mark Owen”, who wrote No Easy Day about the Bin Laden raid, is paying the Navy back millions of dollars to avoid prison—not because of the details, but because he didn't run it through the public affairs office first. Just like I ended point number two with, if I wrote about a fictional shipyard…. Did I… write about a real shipyard?
I guess to summarize that last point, I fictionalized the shipyard and the county as a way of having a legal justification should my former DOD employers ever decide I bruised egos and stepped on toes by not getting permission first.
Last time I checked, this is America. And people doing what they want in a way that betters everyone is why it has always been great.