Actually, answering this is a tiny bit embarrassing since the spark for this entire trilogy was, if I’m remembering correctly, a photo in a glossy magazine of a famous Japanese pop star with his shirt off. This, combined with a few pirate-themed music videos and live performances, led me and a friend to come up with a scenario where all our favourite idols where members of rivalling pirate crews, sailing the seas but mostly just ending up in bed together. We had tons of fun and I sort of planned to write something but then I didn’t, and that was all there was to it.

A few months later, the idea came back to me but this time, the characters were all my own and I saw this young cabin boy, falling in love with a pirate captain. As well as a few other, minor characters and a pretty silly treasure hunt, and that was it. I had wanted to try my hand at novel-writing for a long time and I decided that this was a great place to start – the story was just this stupid, simple idea and I wasn’t that emotionally invested in it. It’d be good for practice. Then, of course, I got very emotionally invested (and if I hadn’t, I would’ve dropped the story quite soon because you need to be in love with your story to be able to spend all that time and effort and energy on it), and all of a sudden I was writing a trilogy and more and more characters popped up, and my silly crackfic-with-OC’s had somehow become inexplicably dear and important to me.

Now, I feel that the message of this story is one about how love is the most important thing of all, and that so much pain could be avoided if people were able to live life the way they wished. Before I started working on this, I didn’t know much about pirate society (or anti-society?) and the word “pirates” made me think of rum, and eye patches, and Johnny Depp, and men swinging their cutlasses while saying “yarr” a lot. Nowadays I know that the world of Caribbean pirates was infinitely more complex, and that these were actual humans, many of them people who had been excluded by society because of rigid laws or norms, or people who had fled to be able to do what they wanted. It’s such a fascinating time and I am in no way doing it justice in this book, which is after all written for entertainment purposes and does contain plenty of rum, and at least one eye patch. But if I can make anyone reading it the least bit interested in knowing more about pirate life, then I’m more than happy!