This will be the final Pirates of Pensacola Meet the Author post as I am hitting the sea (actually, the road—to go to the airport, but that doesn’t sound quite as fitting).

The question is whether I will now meet my Maker. Why? I’m meeting pirates. My publisher, St. Martin’s Press, is sending me to sign copies of my book at pirate festivals, starting with the Blackbeard Festival in Hampton, Virginia on Saturday, June 4th.

But before we get to the details of my demise, a bit of background for those of you who don’t know the pirate Blackbeard: His real name was Edward Teach. The monicker was synonymous with terror thanks to a repertoire of intimidation that included placing lit matches in his hair and beard so that it appeared to sailors whose ships he boarded that his head was spouting fire. In 1995, a bearded man performed a similar stunt in New York City’s Washington Square Park. People took him for insane and he was hauled off to Bellevue. In Blackbeard’s less media-savvy time (1715-ish), people took him for Satan.

One of my favorite things about Blackbeard: He had his own pirate flag that was something of a pirate flag hodgepodge: black, with a crappily-drawn Devil holding an hourglass in one hand while stabbing a heart to bloody bits with the other. Everybody told Blackbeard they really liked it.

The Blackbeard Festival is one of the biggest pirate festivals on the planet, with 30,000 pirates and pirate fans expected to attend, which is odd, as it’s a celebration of the eventual beheading of Blackbeard by the Law. You’d think they’d be protesting, right? No. See, Blackbeard was the pirating equivalent of a monopoly. When his ticket was punched, it opened jobs for lots of other pirates.

Now, back to the subject of my own ticket being punched: How these piratefolk in Virginia will take to a book writer, I don’t know. They might use me on the receiving end of the cannon demo, or for a jib. Hopefully I’ll escape and write another book and come back and be met via blog again. Either way, I’ve enjoyed this sail, and am grateful to Adam and the other MindSay shipmates for the opportunity. It’s been fun meeting and jawing with all of you. If you see me at a pirate festival, and I’m not hanging from a ship’s rigging, let’s grab a grog.

P.S. Be sure and enter the Miss Pyrat Pageant

If you’re going to write a book, you may find it helpful to know what it’s about. I didn’t, as I learned recently at a book party (for someone else’s book). It was at a brownstone in New York City’s West Village. Someone noted afterwards that the décor hearkened that of a French Country estate. I hadn’t noticed as I was preoccupied with the chef making sushi and the servers passing it through the crowd. Also, I had a long conversation, excerpted below, with a woman who was 40 or so. She introduced herself as a poet and student of life. She was wearing a designer dress that, if you squinted, looked like one of the togas in “Animal House.”

Her: What is your book about?

Me: Pirates.

Her: No, come on, sweetie, tell me?

Me: Well I can give you the 45-second version. I know it by heart at this point.

Her: Please.

Me: The Cooke and Hood families have been at each other’s throats since the Spanish Main days. The latest chapter in their piratic rivalry takes place in 2004, when an old treasure map turns up. None of this seems to matter to Morgan Cooke, a cowardly, landlubbing accountant entirely ignorant of his heritage until his estranged father, Isaac, in need of crewmen, kidnaps him and thrusts him into the fray. When Morgan wakes up on a boat in the middle of the Caribbean, he learns that piracy still flourishes, albeit with far more discretion than in the old days—pirates disguise their fast boats as shrimpers or tugs—but with no less bloodshed. Judging even a shot at riches vastly preferable to a return to his lonely, fluorescent-lit workstation existence, Morgan sets sail.

Her: But what is it about?

Me: Getting booty—

Her(unamused): Very amusing. What is the message? What does the work say about the world?

Me: That if you want pirate treasure you have to fight pirates sometimes?

Her: You are the coy one.

Me: It’s just supposed to be entertainment, like a popcorn movie.

Her: No, I have heard things about you. It’s much more than that. It has to be. Subconsciously or otherwise, you have made a statement about the world. About the never-ending struggle of good versus evil perhaps?

Me: I guess so, sure.

Her: Very nice, very nice.

Me: Thank you.

If you write a novel and then do a public reading, here’s what you might expect (As of last night, I’m a veteran of two readings):

You show up at the bookstore fifteen minutes prior to the scheduled start time. There’s a banner over the door that announces “AUTHOR EVENT.” You think, That’s a coincidence, I’m doing an event here too. Then you realize… And even if the reading is at the North Pole, you start to sweat.

Someone who works there escorts you to the “Reading Alcove”—nice way of saying a bunch of folding chairs that have been unfolded in the back. At an average bookstore your audience will range, if you’re a rookie novelist, from three to thirty people (the point of a reading is less the attendance or in-store sales than the excuse it gives your publisher’s publicity dept. to get you local media in order to get greater sales). The folks stare at you—some recognizing you from the ad, others the mug shot that somehow found its way onto your book jacket. You’ll see your the book in a few hands, awaiting your signature. That’s quite gratifying, and puts you at ease—or at lowers you to only a 7 on the Nervousness Scale.

With deep conviction and excitement, the person introducing you tells the audience about a fine, new writer. Again it takes a moment before you realize he’s talking not about a forthcoming reader but you. You thank him profusely, resist the impulse to tip him, and you take the podium. You grip it with both hands to steady yourself. Then you launch into the five or six pages you plan to read. Back-up Plan: You’ll cut it at two pages if the snores get too loud, or the hecklers get too loud, or too much rotten fruit is hucked at you.

From sentence one, you’re distracted by the implicit awkwardness of the presentation: a novel is something one is supposed to read quietly to one’s self. Then people start to laugh at some of the lines. That feels better than finding money. And they laugh some more. You suddenly think books are way better read aloud that quietly to one’s self. The pages fly by. At the end, you find yourself proposing to the entire audience that you all go hit a local tavern for grog, on you.


An audience member:

“You should write what you know,” a graduate student of writing told me. A few years ago, interested in trying my hand at a novel, I’d gone to a reading night her university put on. Every piece presented had these items in common:


1. The protagonist was a graduate student of writing.

2. The protagonist faced societal pressure to go to law or medical or business school but, damn it, he/she was going to follow his/her heart and write a novel.

3. The writing was hard, necessitating psychoanalysis and anti-depressants.

4. He/she had recently suffered a traumatic break-up, necessitating more anti-depressants.


The evening made me wonder whether writers should be forbidden from writing what they know. Had Frank Herbert (one of my favorites) stuck to what he knew, would his characters have flown thousands of light-years to a desert planet populated by worms the size of Amtrak trains? Would Shakespeare have told Antony and Cleopatra’s story? I decided the answer is maybe. In those cases, too, the protagonists faced difficult internal and external challenges in order to follow their hearts. The authors wrote about something they knew very well: people. The thing is, they added research and imagination to the mix. Too often, I think, the “Write What You Know” school discounts those.

My novel, Pirates of Pensacola, is about an accountant and his pirate father who sail a clipper ship and battle cutthroats in order to get gold. What do I know about these things? I have a father I know pretty well. The father-son dynamic is the heart of my novel. So that was fairly key. Otherwise I don’t know much: I’ve done a few tax returns, I can sail a Sunfish, and I was in Pensacola once. I do have considerable experience with cutthroats (six years working in Hollywood). The sum total would not have made for such an interesting book. So I learned about a topic that interested me, then sat around playing make-believe. I recommend those.


P.S. Here’s a scene from my next book, which is about whalers in the Caribbean. I saw a whale once from shore in Hawaii.

Several people have asked for an excerpt from my book "Pirates of Pensacola." According to my contract, I’m only allowed to post a few hundred words unless I get permission. I don’t like having to get permission. I even have an ax to grind with the word permission. Anyway, before I foam at the mouth over this and the foam shorts out my computer, and—just ’cause this sort of thing happens in California—somehow electrocutes everyone in my power grid, I’m going to provide an excerpt without permission. Am I looking for trouble? Well, it was just posted on Amazon. So what I’m going to do is give a link to it below. So hopefully I’m legal. In any case, the excerpt starts at the beginning of Chapter One. (What they don’t tell you is there’s a whole big prologue before it that takes place 30 years earlier. In the prologue, Morgan (one of the main characaters)’s father (the other main character) goes to a masquerade ball costumed as a pirate, then actually pirates jewels there, and gets caught, leaving Morgan alone for the remainder of his childhood. Also useful to know: Both characters say "cripes" a lot.) Now here is the link. If I do not post again, figure it’s because I was wrong and have no internet access in my cell.

Pirates of Pensacola excerpt