About
I’m one of those people who vows that one day she will write a novel. And not just any novel, a really good novel. One that people can’t put down, one that is both lauded and torn apart by critics. One that is read over and over again until the cover wears off, that is dog-eared and cherished and given as a gift to a good friend, an avid reader. One that people love and love to hate.
You get the idea.
I’ve wanted to write a novel since I was ten or something. My problem was that I couldn’t find a subject matter or characters that I was so madly in love with I couldn’t stop writing. I would start aaaaaaaand…. quit. And start aaaaaaaaaaand… quit. When I went to law school, I thought it was official: Any drop of creative juice I had once had was gone. Drained. Finito.
Then, one day, I was watching one of the Pirates of the Caribbean on TV and it occurred to me that other than Johnny Depp’s hot ass and the cool special effects, the movie kinda… sucked. Actually, halfway through the first one, I got completely lost and had no idea what was happening. I sat through the second one not knowing what in God’s name was going on, wondering why some dude had a squid-face.
For some reason, I began to wonder: Who were the real pirates of the Caribbean? Some of them were household names (Morgan, Blackbeard) but only because advertisers used them to sell rum and car insurance and toys. I began to read books on the subject, lots and lots of books, amazing, well-written, incredibly well-researched books such as The Republic of Pirates by Colin Woodard, Under the Black Flag by David Cordingly, The Sea Rover’s Practice by Benerson Little… those are merely three books of many, many, many I have read. I discovered that there was far more to pirates than popular culture would have us believe. Sure, a lot of them were thugs and criminals and sadists. Sure, most of them sought pleasure and lawlessness and a carefree existence. But several of them were good guys with bad luck, courageous, angry men who’d found themselves having to choose between a short but miserable existence, or, in the alternative, a short but merry one. Some of them were veritable Robin Hoods, sailors and servants and slaves rebelling against what they saw as social injustice. And those creative juices started flowing again. The pirates of fiction are colorful dudes, such as Long John Silver, Captain Blood, Captain Hook. But the real guys – the pirates of the Flying Gang, of the Great Voyage – their stories were, by far, more amazing than anything a novelist or screenwriter could come up with.
I wanted to portray the “noble” among the Golden Age pirates in a way that a modern reader could relate, and how better to do that than drop a modern woman in their midst? There would be culture shock, language barriers, and a completely different sense of humanity, of what it meant to live, to die, to survive. How would I, or anybody from this era, deal with that?
It’s official: I am in love with my story, and I am compelled to write it. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it.
Contact me. I love getting mail.
Me in my $15 “pirate wench” costume from Target (Tar-JAY). What?
Rima