Interview with Rima Laham Jean author of the The Noble Pirates

• What is your fiction about? It's about time travel and pirates. This is what my response is every time someone asks me this question, and it always elicits the raising of an eyebrow and, occasionally, nausea. Not that I blame anyone -- telling people you are writing about these things individually will get you some bizarre looks. Together? People start to wonder if you've escaped an asylum.

• Are you serious? Yes. I thought it would be fun. Keep in mind that I do my historical research; other than the time travel part, I try to be true to the facts. After watching Pirates of the Caribbean on TV one day, 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?

• Are you on heavy drugs? Sometimes. Your point?

• Is your main character you? No. But I try to give her my snark. I try to imagine, for all intents and purposes, what I would do or feel if I were suddenly amidst a bunch of buccaneers.

• Don't you have two kids? When do find the time to blog, write fiction, and do web design??? If you've been reading my blog(s) for a while, you'll know that I DON'T SLEEP. Nor do I cook, clean, or do laundry. There in lies the secret.

Posted by Under The Black Flag on 8:19 π.μ.. Filed under books, The Noble Pirates . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0