I found the backup of the Half Million on an old hard drive when doing a creative audit a few months ago, and for some reason “An American Werewolf on the Titanic,” which I hadn’t read in 25 years, got under my skin. It was well-written for something I knocked out over a few days when I was 26, but it was also more or less what it said on the tin: a wealthy American werewolf travels on the Titanic with his faithful companion, and when disaster strikes they’re forced to resort to extreme measures to survive. There was no exploration of class, culture, or morals, and the research amounted to “The writer watched ‘Titanic’ once.”

It was definitely time for a rewrite. Trouble is, the movie made everyone an expert, and many of them were fans. I once spent two hours trying to determine if a kid in western Tennessee would have been able to watch “The Lone Ranger” on TV in 1955. I spent the next three months with 26 open browser tabs, exploring everything from the layout to the clothing to the slang, as well as biographies of all the major figures. I read restaurant menus, discovered how much the swimming pool cost to use, and counted the number of available toilets. If I didn’t get all this stuff right, I was going to get letters…