Tag: Pirates of the Caribbean

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In Which I Shut Up and Wrote

As the little date indicates, it’s been about three months since the last post. New Year’s Day seems like an apropos time to let you all know what I’ve been doing instead of blogging.

In late September, I flew to Shenzhen for business reasons associated with my day job (i.e. the Pirates of the Caribbean project). Shenzhen is a lovely tropical metropolis on the Chinese coast. Basically, if you go to the island of Hong Kong and then take a bridge to the mainland, you’re in Shenzhen. It’s full of Times-Square-style glitz, but with lots of trees and green spaces.

I came away from the trip with squid-flavored potato chips and red tea, brought my daughter a silk scarf embroidered with skulls (she’s writing horror interactive fiction these days) and swore I would never again be on a plane trying to outrun a typhoon.

Around that time, I finished my burst of reading and reviewing urban fantasy books. Since publishing Civil Blood, I’ve joined a bunch of UF readers’ groups, and posted my reviews to Amazon, Goodreads and Booklikes (the links here are to my rec lists). If you are looking for some new reads, or some old ones, feel free to check out my short list of long reviews. When I wasn’t doing that, I was chugging away in the Critters Writer’s Workshop, critiquing short stories and the first chapters of a lot of novels. The break that let me read instead of write gave me some necessary perspective and a few new online friends.

Then I did a numbers game with Civil Blood: it got a few kind reviews and a few mediocre ones, but neither seemed to drive any sales (literally, zero — I have metrics). Then I hit the extreme down-side of self-publishing: I had cordoned off a specific budget for the novel and, by extension, any sequels. No profit, no sequel, that’s the rule. As an additional stab to the liver, no traditional publisher will touch a self-published series unless it is raking in the readers by the cathedral-full. So any chance of writing a sequel and submitting it would be a nearly-impossible needle to thread.

So I took a break from sequel planning and told myself I should do some short stories — one in the Civil Blood universe and one in the climate fiction genre, something I’ve been meaning to try. I composed the first CB-universe short story, “Stopping the Bleeding,” and got it reviewed in a workshop, because I needed a lot of fresh eyes that hadn’t lived in the novel’s world for the past year. The critiques came in throughout November, interrupting my cli-fi attempt. National Novel Writing Month for me was more like National Kinda Write Um Some Short Story Drafts This Year.

On top of that, a colleague and friend, Chris L’Etoile and his wife Jamie, were hit with what’s politely called a “life event.” Jamie got seriously ill. Complications from the illness led to a stroke that paralyzed her right side. At the time, Chris was on the other side of the continent. My wife and I (and a *ton* of other friends) jumped in to help. So November and December had a lot of online searches for resources, phone calls, and late-night discussions of WTF Will They Do To Get Through The Week. (My explanatory Facebook post that got retweeted all over the place is here and the GoFundMe is here. We raised a lot, but their expenditures are *insane*, so rest assured that any contributions will not be wasted.

So you better believe I wasn’t paying attention to blogging, right?

In late December, things calmed down a little. I did some short story revisions, so I’m going into the new year with the following goals:

  • Extend Civil Blood’s readership (I have additional plans not specified here).
  • Get “Stopping the Bleeding” and possibly additional CB-universe material out to readers.
  • Finish and submit a cli-fi story to a magazine or anthology.
  • Announce and launch a new intellectual property that is currently secret.
  • Attend conventions to meet new people — announcements will be posted here and on Twitter.
  • Do 30 minutes of cardio a day, 6 days a week — I’m on Week 3 at the moment!
  • Stick it to The Man.

Thanks for sticking with this ginormous update to the end. May you smooch a replicant in 2019, and may the old gods bless your new beginnings.

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Blame the Pirates

When someone busts out an article on “Pirates in Popular Culture,” there’s usually some mention of Peter Pan, and Treasure Island, and Talk Like a Pirate Day. Now of course, Jack Sparrow and Black Sails will probably make an appearance.

This post isn’t about any of the above. It’s about the weird factoids that I’ve come across when writing Pirates of the Caribbean that have struck me as cocktail party fodder. As it turns out, the Age of Sail and the Golden Age of Pirates are a trove of trivia.

Examples:

The expression “Above Board”

We want people to deal “above board” with us, meaning honestly and fairly. But where’s the expression from? Pirates.

Turns out, the boards in question are the deck of a ship. Pirates would stash their armed troops below the deck when nearing a target so that they could look legitimate long enough to get into attack range. Someone who has all their men “above board” is not a scalawag bent on robbing you.

The epithet “Limey”

Scurvy was a serious problem if you were planning an ocean voyage. I should draw the distinction between a full-on trans-Atlantic voyage and just cruising up and down the coasts as pirates frequently did. Sailors had to pack a lot more carefully for one than the other.  Fresh fruit is easy to come by in the tropics, but it doesn’t store so great for long trips across the Pond. One of the key exceptions to this was a fruit that packed vitamin C, preserved well, and grew in Caribbean soil: the lime.

Part of the British Royal Navy’s daily rations to keep the sailors’ teeth in their heads was a shot of grog — rum with lime juice. And so, the slang for a Royal Navy sailor became “limey,” and the phrase eventually evolved to mean a Brit of any stripe.

What the snot “Avast!” means

I always chalked this one up as some kind of pirate battle cry. People repeat the word saying “Avast, me hearties” or some variant thereof when they dress up as a pirate for Halloween. For years, that was about as far as my Talk Like a Pirate education went.

“Avast!” means, “stop whatever you’re doing.” So if a pirate jumps onto your deck and yells it while pointing a pistol at you, in context it would probably mean “stop trying to escape,” or “stop fighting back or I’ll gut you like a tuna.” The phrase “belay that” is similar, but is more of a general order and doesn’t sound nearly as violent.

The best wood for ship parts

To no one’s surprise, English oak was the go-to standard for masts and planks. It’s durable. To a lesser extent, ash wood made an appearance, too. Oak forests were a strategic resource in the Age of Sail, and capturing or destroying a warship was a serious financial blow. All that said, there’s a lesser-known wood that is kind of interesting.

The tree it comes from is called lignum vitae, or guayacan. It’s a Caribbean wood that is much denser than oak — it doesn’t even float in water. You wouldn’t want to make a ship out of it, but it is very strong, and oozes a little sap so it’s self-lubricating. That made it ideal for an axle for the ship’s wheel or the apparatus leading down to the rudder. For its strength and resilience, lignum vitae is classified as one of several trees called “ironwood.”

The metric system

Why do we citizens of the U.S. still measure our impulses in foot-pounds rather than joules? Why do we put up with inches and miles instead of centimeters and kilometers? Because of pirates.

Okay, slight exaggeration. The U.S. has had several good chances to convert, and it’s always refused. But there’s an amusing story about Thomas Jefferson, noted Francophile and Secretary of State in 1793. He wanted the U.S. to adopt a standard of weights and measures since some states still used Dutch systems, others English, and so forth.

So the French government sent a nerd (um… gentleman scientist) named Joseph Dombey with a few carefully constructed official weights to the U.S. He was going to do some lobbying and persuading, and the U.S. might have gone metric.

Except it didn’t. A storm came up. Dombey’s ship got blown into the Caribbean. And they got robbed by pirates. The weights and measures were auctioned off with the rest of the booty.

So the next time you eat a Quarter Pounder instead of a Royale with Cheese, blame a pirate.

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Sunken Treasure and Related Conversation

I had dinner this week with Dr. Sam Willis, who’s our historical expert on Seasun’s Pirates of the Caribbean project. If you haven’t followed him on Twitter (@DrSamWillis), you might want to give it a try — he lives a much more interesting life than homebody writers such as myself. Exhibit A in this regard is his recent dive for a shipwreck off the coast of where Kenya meets Somalia.

Apparently there’s been a wreck there that the locals have known about forever, but only recently did anyone scrape together the funding and the interest to find out what it was. Because it’s on an ancient (okay, 14th century or so) trade route from Singapore past India and up into the Persian Gulf, the place is lousy with shipwrecks. The Chinese government got interested, thinking the wreck might be Chinese. There were some fragments of Chinese pottery washing up on the beach, so it was worth a dive. Turns out the wreck was Portuguese, so the Chinese funding dried up, but there might still be other Chinese wrecks out there. Not to mention the historical value of the Portuguese wreck to Portugal or historians who specialize in the time period.

Having recently written up a page on this blog about Shadowrun’s Cyberpirates, this immediately brought up some questions and scenarios that could make good RPG fodder. In that supplement, the authorial team didn’t deal with sunken treasure too much. Speaking just for myself, I figured that treasure-hunting for Spanish gold from the Age of Sail was going to be a lot less likely than treasure-hunting for Yakuza bullion on the yacht you sank last game session.

But the way Sam described it made me want to revisit the subject. For starters, the rule in the modern world is no longer “finders, keepers.” Ever since some guy in Florida found a Spanish treasure galleon with emeralds the size of golf balls back in the early 20th century, governments and museums got pretty active with the court decisions. If you don’t find it in international waters (a few miles off the coasts, where the water is usually so deep you’re not going to casually find stuff anyway), your claim on the treasure is pretty tenuous. Museums will argue in court that you don’t have the resources to research or curate the artifacts, and they do, so it’s in the public and societal interest that they get the goods you found. Sam told us the story of a Templar treasure stolen out of Jerusalem by the Knights of Malta that was sunk by the British off the coast of Egypt. Who gets the rights to a treasure like that? If you answered “Malta,” “Britain,” “Egypt” or “Israel,” you get half credit. If you answered “the guy who found it,” you get none. The governments involved will bring out the lawyers and the experts you probably can’t afford. A brief article on the subject is here and legal links are here if you’re so inclined.

All of this could make for an interesting RPG adventure or two, because while the average PC violates ten laws before breakfast, his employers’ motivations are usually rooted in some kind of legal situation they need to get around. Let’s see what we can come up with to start you off:

  • A historical team with no government funding hires the player characters as muscle because they’ve figured out there’s a valuable wreck near an obscure coast. They intend to pay the PCs with either grant money or loot from the wreck. Why do they need muscle? Because there are pirates up and down the coast who will pick on any unarmed research vessel. (Researchers make good hostages.) This scenario is a little more immediately cinematic than the others, because it gives the PCs the thrill of actually going under water and grabbing the sunken treasure themselves, which of course can lead to the inevitable underwater combat scene.
  • A historical team with government or corporate funding shot off their mouths and while they were in port arranging their expedition, an unscrupulous treasure-hunter figured out their dive location and scooped them. Faced with complete failure, the historians want the PCs to steal back the treasure. The claim-jumpers are going to sell it at a black market auction full of tough pirate customers, or else have a deal with a highly lethal corporate acquisitions team. Said team is packing a magical expert, which the treasure-hunter is not. Bonus points if you can punch someone on the deck of a ship and yell “that belongs in a museum!”
  • A treasure-hunter hires the player characters, insisting he has a claim to a treasure pulled out of an old wreck. The treasure is currently in the hands of an unscrupulous corporation that hired a smarmy lawyer. With a judge’s blessing, they acquired “his” treasure and are now turning the magically interesting parts (there’s always a magical widget, isn’t there?) over to their magical research division. The PC’s job is to break into the highly secure magical research division headquarters, and if they succeed, they get to keep some of the good stuff.
  • The unscrupulous corporation has heard about the historical team, knows they’re on to something good, and hires the PCs. The PCs are told to get close to the team, observe them, and strike at the best possible moment to abscond with the goods with no witnesses. The corp probably lies to the PCs and says the historians are grave robbers who deserve what’s coming to them. Maybe the PCs have fake identities ready to go to pose as security for the historians, or maybe they pose as buyers. Either way, the PCs have to make the moral decision to follow through or side with the historical team against their sociopath employer.

That’s what I’ve got off the top of my head. Game on.

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Let’s Get You Started

I’ve been building the Writing Tour section of the site with links to Mass Effect, Shadowrun, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars, and the rest. However, due to a quirk of WordPress, it’s easier to put tags on posts than it is on pages. So this post is a sort of welcome mat with long data-driven tentacles, trailing the Internet like a jellyfish.

If you’re looking for the content, start here.