Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers came about from a couple of things. The first was that I went from never having been on a cruise ship to now having three under my belt in just a couple years. When you’re a fantasy writer on a cruise ship, you can’t help but think about how a kraken attack would go down.
Also, pirates are actually really scary. I know popular culture has made them handsome and heroic, but read about real pirates from real history, and let’s just say I’m glad to live now over back then. It’s funny because the past sometimes gets a rose colored hue when we are entertaining ourselves with fiction. Watch five minutes of One Piece on Netflix and pirating looks kinda fun, cool, and an adventure.
Read about a real pirate from history, and it’s grueling, torturous, thankless existence that most likely ended in violence with the only question being how much torture happened during the shuffling off the mortal coil. Look up keelhauling, it doesn’t sound like a fun way to go.
Because fantasy pirates and real historical pirates are so vastly different from each other, I kinda wanted to write a book that bridges that gap Whimsical Death. Jack was needing to take a vessel anyway, and I could have written a chapter or two about him chartering a ship, but what we have in this book is so much better than a quickly how he got from point A to point B. It’s entire mashing of the brutal reality of humanity’s past when we weren’t as nice to each other as we are now, and the whimsy and fun worthy of One Piece jaunty adventure on the high seas.
It’s a good blend of reality and fantasy that it’s worthy of the Carnt series that’s smashing a fantasy world and ours together. Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
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