Pirates!

When I set out writing as an adult, there were a certain set of subjects I resolved I was unfit to write.

Topics that I knew better, because I still had a very childish relationship with the subject matter.

I would not write horse books.  I would not write unicorns.  I would not write pirates.  I would not write dolphins.  I would not write dragons.

For a certain period of years when I was young, I read nothing but horse books.  Every book in every series.  I had my horse book friends, and we did nothing but talk about the contents of these books.  Specifically, note, these are the-horse-and-the-girl-who-loved-it books.

I also read The Black Stallion and Black Beauty and the like.

But, no, the horse and the girl who loved it was at the center of my reading heart, and I would forgive those books anything.

A teacher took my mother aside and told her that it really was time for me to find some more mature reading material, and I moved on to Robert B. Parker and Tom Clancy not long after this.  She was right, my teacher.

It was time.

I don’t think she anticipated The Hunt for Red October, but whatever, man.  I had good bookshelves to pick off of, and if I was going to pick a book, it was going to be one of the big ones.

Horse books were a major event for a specific age of my life, and because of how young that age was and because of how emotionally enthusiastic I was about them, I’ve known through most of my maturity that writing them was a bad idea, because I was going to write them like an eight-year-old.

Revertigo.

It’s a force of nature.

Fast-forward to the Big Bold Plan, where I discovered Verida and started dropping characters into it left and right.  They all fit.  They all worked.

Verida is a huge city with a modicum of political structure and what so far appears to be a boundless capacity to adopt unexpected features.  I went from King’s Guard and merchants to underworld heist assassins and thieves without blinking.  An artist’s colony appeared, with a mysterious wandering bridge.  (I haven’t been there, yet, y’all, because I’m afraid it’s going to spawn its own series.  This is very possible.)

And as I was wandering around Verida, learning the geography and the water flow and the seasons, I realized that there were islands off the coast that were just crawling with pirates.

And I also realized that, as giddy and silly as Johnny Depp’s pirate ambiance made me, many years back, I’m able to write such a story without being unduly effected by that era of my life.

I’ve outgrown that overwhelming influence.

So I made a plan and I wrote pirates.

If you’ve read either The Queen’s Chair or Murderers, Thieves, & Velvet, you’ve met them, in their ones and twos.

Some of the things you believe about them are true.  Some of them aren’t.  Some of the pirates you’ve met or are about to meet have secrets that are going to turn out to be very well kept and very important, as things go along.  As with everything in Verida, the politics are important, and so are the economics.  Your friends can be opportunities and they can also be threats.  But I’ve grown to profoundly love the sun-soaked culture of sea and sand that emerges from the world of the Pirate Islands.

These are their own style of fun, and I hope that you enjoy them as much as I am.

Now.

You think I lost the plot of my own essay, starting out with horse books and how I can’t write them because I still think about horses like a dreamy-eyed eight-year-old.

Nope.

The day I gave myself permission to write pirates, I also gave myself permission to write horses.

Hill Chargers shows up this fall.

I cannot wait.