Verisimilitude

 

The log cabin that Kyle and Karen used was a real place in rural Wisconsin owned by my grandfather. Becker's office on Water Street, the Voom Voom strip club, the Ham and Egger, a Winneconne resort, the rental house and coal-fired furnace were real. I drove the streets of Milwaukee and rode city buses, knew the docks, the Imperial billiard hall, Kalt's theater crowd, the Lower East Side, and spectacularly foxy babes like Liz Kelson. Rude dialogue from 1975 was authentic, real mob figures, car bombings and gunfire. I visited the Sentinel newsroom and painfully shabby inner city neighborhoods. Young tough guys smoked cigarettes. Old cops smoked cigars. Partners is mostly a true story.

 

In The Good Walk Alone, every road and vehicle was a real environment. Mars Colony took months to design and engineer in a Quake game environment. The Martian fraternal robes, oaths, and rigmarole were based on personal lodge experience. I met troubled warriors who drank to blot out the horror of killing. I have super sharp hearing like Harry Faraday does. I know what happens in a Red Light district, including private vengeance. I played poker in the back room of The Millionaires Club, a ghostly old bar that opened in 1871 and had a history of angry drunks who worked and died underground. Everything on Mars had an existential referent, including the very ill lawyer who befriended Harry.

 

Chris and Peachy went places I knew, met people I knew, fought bad guys I knew. In Escape, the hull of Spar One was a believable design, a spinning disc to create artificial gravity. Hansje and Cantwell were based on life experience. The twins in Chiseltown were real people. I worked with folks like Adele, Joe, Jonathan, Mike, Billy, and Bart. I had a driver named Andy.

 

This is all well and good, but fiction is inherently distorted and amplified for a reason. Heroism is rare in life. That's the whole purpose of taking what exists, using it to probe what might and ought to happen, with convincing verisimilitude to suspend disbelief. You can't make a movie that makes people laugh and flinch unless they accept the action and dialogue as "real world" events, no awareness of painted canvas backdrops or editorial tricks.

 

The challenge in Steam Punk is believability. Every page.