That’s right! You can now read Chapter One of Persona at either its Wattpad link or the Story Blog.
And just as I promised, I’m going to post the Fact vs. Fiction rundown for the story here. You can find it on a separate page on the story blog as well, but for those who prefer Wattpad I thought I’d smack it up here as well.
Fact Vs. Fiction
Fact: The SS Ceramic was a real ship. If you take a look at Uboat.net you can find the SS Ceramic. When it sunk just after midnight on the 7th of December, 1942 (yes I made the date the same) it actually had 133 fare paying passengers on board, which is exactly what I needed for my fictional Megan Crossweathers to be there.
That’s just the fare paying passengers, there were actually many more people on board, to include nurses in Queen Alexandria’s Imperial Nursing Service. You’ll notice I put that in the chapter as well.
I chose not to mention the 12 reported children on board the ship for several reasons. First, it breaks my heart. I’m a parent myself and I just can’t read/write books that highlight the death of a child. Second, there just wasn’t enough time between Megan’s seasickness and the sinking.
Fiction: Regardless of whatever Captain Denton Gray might have been up to, there’s no way one man and one woman would have taken a boat on their own. With so many people abandoning the ship they would have likely joined in with one of the other boats. However, for the purposes of the book I needed to get Denton and Megan away from everybody else.
Fact: The sole survivor of the SS Ceramic was Sapper Eric Munday of the Royal Engineers. The only reason he survived is because Henke — the dude in charge of U-515, the U-boat who sunk the Ceramic — surfaced at around midday to find many of the lifeboats had capsized in the massive storm. He ordered for the first survivor who reached the U-Boat to be taken on board, which happened to be Munday.
AJMaguire 