#*fuck you david cordingly

[regicidal-defenestration]

If I had a penny for every fictionalised Zheng Yi Sao character who got kinda sidelined in favour of male characters I'd have two pennies which is not a lot but by god if you are going to put the most successful pirate in history* in your show you could at least give her some decent plot

[lovenona]

me, waking up: oh another day. then, after reading your answer: HOLY SHIT. guess i'm now the loving ramble enabler (LRE?). and DO NOT apologize for being passionate about smt that makes you happy you lovely human being that u are! hearing you ramble (how many times will i use this word idek) about the creation process made my day dammit! and i can assure you, reading about it is as good as reading the masterpiece itself, especially considering how good you are at manifesting the vibes (tm) (pt1)

(pt 2 bc word count sucks) how did you first get interested in pirate history? (if you don't mind me asking ofc) *slides 15 bucks* please, be my guest. do tell us more about the writing/revision process. sincerely, a genuinely interested person currently wondering why the fuck tumblr won't let her do a paragraph break. have a lovely night/day!

bestie ur rly enabling me 😭 ur so sweet skSJKAJSk i will tell u so much under this god damn cut 

first because this is the easy response: how did u get interested in pirate history????

short answer: keira knightley in pirates of the caribbean BYE 💀

long answer: it’s basically a mix of those movies being a centerpiece of my childhood and me just thinking pirates are cool SKJSKAj i’m very much into history n my uni had a course on ‘history of pirates’ last spring so i took it as smth to do during quarantine and i ended up really loving it !!! i’m actually workin on historical fiction short story abt anne bonny and mary read rn which required me to do a lot more research on pirates (under the black flag by david cordingly is a very good book on piracy!) and my research has been very interesting just in general and for writing the odyssey – i've incorporated little historical tidbits here n there to add to the world-building :’)

next: ur writing process

ok so let’s go cray besties i’m going to tell u abt the life of adele writing the odyssey!!!! i’ll try talking abt this in some semblance of a logical step-by-step

1. manifesting vibes + outline

i talked abt this last time but manifesting the vibes is very important ! the first things i like to do when getting ready to write a new chapter is define the setting – place(s), weather, time, and general mood 

while i have a pretty good idea of how many chapters it will be and where the odyssey ends, i usually don’t plan a chapter in super great detail until it’s time to sit down n write it. i have general points of people to include + things that would be important to the plot + vibes i hope to include (parts 6 and 7 r gonna SLAP!!), but these never get fleshed out until it’s Time. my outlines are therefore usually not very detailed because i like to give the odyssey room to do its own thing – i find it important that the story takes its time and we get to the important stuff whenever it wants us to. an outline will usually b something like, in the case of the furies call part 2: 

find megumi, talk abt his role in the zenin clan – naoya arrives on shore and shit hits the fan – run to find mai, maki fights her father – fight between naoya and todou – todou dies because you can’t kill naoya – sukuna rescues reader and it ends

after i have smth that looks like this as well as a decently clear idea of how everything will look and feel we get started!!

2. writing (pain)

arguably the worst stage for any creator! writing! at this point i genuinely just let go and let god tbh. i have no idea how i do things at this stage other than see how many commas + dumb poetic phrases i can include SKKSJKA – sometimes things just happen and it’s really cool!! for example in part 4 i didn’t know the guns warehouse was going to blow up until i was writing it and it just happened 

i do have a set quota of words i meet every time i sit down to write so that i A. feel accomplished and happy when i'm done, even if it sucks and B. don’t get burnout and start hating what i do. this stage is always difficult because writing is just hard and takes a lot of brainpower and self-discipline </3

i wld say the hardest part is that i run the risk of getting very overwhelmed – by the complexities of the plot, by how fucking long it takes me to write, by how much work writing itself is ! for example, abt 7k or so into part 5 i started having the worst existential dread when i realized that this chapter was not even halfway done and i wld have to surpass 15k before it was (at the time of writing this, part 5 is 16.3 💀) it just gets hard sometimes to overcome that and maintain the motivation to keep going and know that everything will be fine when it’s done – thankfully everyone here is so patient and sweet so it makes me feel better when i'm taking forever and/or need time off <333

basically, as always, the pain of writing is just having to write and come to terms with the fact no one else is going to manifest it for u. and have fun too!! writing is only fun when ur writing what u think is cool 

3. revision (less pain)

one of the fun stages, but also the point when i start to become impatient! writing an odyssey chapter can easily take 2.5-3 weeks even if i'm writing my quota every single day (part 5 took roughly 3 weeks of writing every god damn afternoon) and after that i spend another few weeks just going back and rereading/fixing everything. 

i basically start by rereading sections of the chapter to change sentence structure, grammar, dialogue, or whatever else i don’t like – sometimes sentences sound stupid or certain things don’t make a whole lot of sense so i like to go back and polish up! for example i changed the arrival of maki/mai/nobara in furies call part 1 about ten times before i decided it made sense to me

this step can be horrendous because i'll often write things really shitty in the first draft with a “i’ll come back to this later” mindset and then get mad at myself later for being a hoe <//3

in essence, i'm a horrible perfectionist so i will usually reread everything and change or add things multiple times before i think i'm finally ready to share. most of the time, as the chapter gets closer and closer to completion i become more and more hyper-fixated on it – i’ll start spending almost all of my free time just rereading and looking for minor fixes or places that don’t vibe as well. 

at the end of this step, my favorite thing to do before i queue the chapter up to post is sit down and just read the entire thing once or twice and give it one last kiss before i send her off into the world <3

so anyway there’s my ted talk of how i usually make the odyssey ! i vibe, write, revise n take forever to do all three steps but that’s just part of the fun! thank u for tuning in if u have any other questions u wld like me to overshare on i am more than happy to talk abt it :’)

[seventymilestobabylon]

how to get England to bankroll your plan to subdue the pirates of Nassau

step 1: be a bankrupt jerk and write a book step 2: ??? step 3: profit

JUST KIDDING, I read a bunch of shit and I know exactly what Step 2 was. I wrote a Black Sails fic where Flint agrees to Peter Ashe’s plan to procure pardons for the pirates of Nassau. To write that fic, I had to discover how a person would go about procuring a) pardons and b) money for an expedition, which meant I had to read about rotten stupid Woodes Rogers.

So okay. You’re Woodes Rogers, and you got back from an expedition (my notes about this expedition: “Blah blah and then he did some privateering. He knew how to fix scurvy. Great. Have a fucking medal.”) and promptly went bankrupt. Because you are inherently a jerk, you spend some time helping to set up the South Sea Company, the same company that will later plunge a bunch of rich jerks into bankruptcy too. Then you’re like “I know what; I will be the governor of the Bahamas.” How do you go about making this happen?

Talk to some merchants about it. Merchants were very bullish on subduing the pirate threat, because of course they were losing a bunch of money to the pirate threat. Woodes Rogers partnered up with a merchant called Samuel Buck and some other merchant bros who wanted to restore government to the islands. And yes: This is private business enterprises pulling money together to, essentially, run a British government colony by themselves. I cannot describe to you how few fucks the British government seem to have given about governing in the Caribbean in this era. They wanted sugar money. They cared about nothing else.

Write letters to the Lords Proprietor for the Bahamas, requesting a 21-year lease on the Bahamas. Those guys will be into it too because they’re tired of everyone bitching about pirates in the Bahamas.

Get the Council of Trade and Plantations on your side. This will be easy because the Council of Trade and Plantations gets lots of complaints from merchant bros (see above) and doesn’t really have a lot of power to do anything about them. Everyone doing empire is so parlously bad at their jobs; it would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.

Write letters to King George, where you petition to just be in charge of an island because why the fuck not. “My governance will be great for trade,” you write, a super compelling argument given that you have only recently clawed your way out of bankruptcy.

Triumph! A general pardon is agreed to! Three warships are supplied for your use by the Admiralty! You are made governor in the Bahamas!

(Ugh.)

Source:  Cordingly, David. Pirate Hunter of the Caribbean: The Adventurous Life of Captain Woodes Rogers. New York: Random House, 2012.

[whorunwithwolves]

out.

OK so you all know I have a leetle obsession with history, right? OK. Well so I started reading my new book (Pirate Women by Laura Sook Duncombe) and I have moved well past being annoyed at people calling it “the first comprehensive book on female pirates” (seeing as Laura herself talks about Women Pirates & the Politics of the Jolly Roger), But OH MY FUCK NO.

David Cordingly, one of the leading pirate scholars in his book Seafaring Women (original title: Women Sailors & Sailor’s Women - n i c e) wrote an ENTIRE BOOK about female pirates AND YET refused to believe that Anne Bonny & Mary Read were able to live aboard a pirate ship. Two of the ONLY female pirates we have ACTUAL WRITTEN RECORDS (plural) OF.

Did they commute to work? If you simply cannot fathom the idea of women as pirates why the fuck would you write a book about it? I am so happy I did not buy that one. It didn’t seem interesting, but from what I read I wouldn’t have gotten any money back from destroying the everloving hel out of it.

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

||October BPC: Just One Word|| 14. Mother. So I’ve been reading books for Worldbuilding Research Purposes, right? Not for my NaNo project, for something else on the back burner. Not so long ago, I read Seafaring Women by David Cordingly, and it was atrocious. If I pick up a book called Seafaring Women, I expect to hear about the actual women involved, not their husbands and men in their lives. Women were an accessory, and I hated that.

This book, however, doesn’t do that. This one quotes extensively from the women’s diaries--most of them are wives of captains, but there are some daughters, too. The book is about the women, not the men (revolutionary, right? Oh, wait, look who wrote this one). It’s spectacular. I got to read about how periods were handled on ships with my own two eyeballs, and it was much more enlightening than Seafaring Women.

Anyway, so I highly recommend this one to anyone who’s interested in women on ships in the nineteenth century, or anyone who’s interested in women and boats. Women were, in fact, on boats, and on the ocean, and here’s the proof in their own words. I’m a little more than halfway through, and it hasn’t let me down yet.