Barbados Bound by Linda Collison

It all started with a ship. On April 14,1999, I saw in the newspaper a startlingly anachronistic colour photograph of a three-masted wooden ship under sail. It looked like it had just sailed out ofthe eighteenth century. Below it, an intriguing advertisement:

Help wanted: Deckhands to man floating museum…a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to sail as crew on Endeavour, the replica of Capt.James Cook’s ship that will visit Hawaii in November. Crewmembers sleep in hammocks slung together on the lower deck. They must be prepared to go aloftand work the sails at any time of day in any weather, not suffer from chronicseasickness or fear of heights, and be physically fit. Sailing experience is not essential…

     Six months later my husband and I were at the dock in Vancouver, signing ship's articles.
     We are sailors, my husband Bob and I. We have a sailboat of our own and quite a few nautical miles under our belts, but we knew essentially nothing about sailing an 18th century,three-masted tallship.  
     The crew promised to teach the recruits everything we needed to know, and so we leaped at the opportunity. It sounded like a great adventure, and indeed it was. In fact, it changed my life and gave me a new passion: Maritime history. I actually went back to college to study history, having majored in Nursing, the first time around.

     Bob and I spent three weeks aboard the Endeavour, as part of the foremast watch, crossing the Northern Pacific Ocean. We learned the names and functions of the hundreds of lines, sails and spars that power the ship; we learned to climb aloft on the ratlines, stepping out on the foot ropes under the yards to make and furl sail. We took turns steering the ship and were responsible for cleaning and maintaining her in eighteenth-century fashion. We slept in hammocks we strung from the deckhead every evening. The voyage crew,as we green-but-willing sailors were called, bonded quickly, for we were all init together and we all felt the same swing of emotions -- anxiety, fear,fatigue, exhaustion, sea-sickness, hunger, occasionally resentment – but most of all, exhilaration and awe. For me, those weeks on the Endeavour were nothing short of a time machine.

     When Bob and I disembarked in Kona, Hawaii, I carried with me the seeds for a novel. It would not be about Captain Cook or his extraordinary voyages, but it would begin in the mid-eighteenth century, aboard a vessel quite like the one I had sailed on. I wanted to explore what it might have been like to have been a woman aboard a ship; not a passive passenger but a woman who takes an active part, who is part of the crew. My research proved there were many women aboard ships in the age of sail.  At least thirty and quite likey more, who dressed and worked as men.Their stories, when told, have typically been romanticized and somewhat discredited. I wanted to bring out the gritty reality. Working aboard the Endeavour helped me experience that. My experience as a registered nurse, specializing in Emergency and Critical Care, also came into play.

     My first historical novel was five years in the researching and writing. It wasoriginally published as Star-Crossed by Knopf/Random House, and chosenby the New York Public Library to be among the Books for the Teen Age --2007. Yet I hadn't really written it for teens, but from a teenaged girl's perspective.  
     I was so caught up with the characters and the historical background that I wrote a sequel, Surgeon's Mate, which Knopf turned down. They weren't interested in a series. But Fireship Press was. PublisherTom Grundner offered me a contract for Surgeon's Mate, and offered to publish Star-Crossed under a different title as soon as he could acquire it. As soon as Star-Crossed was out of print I obtained a reversion of rights, rewrote the manuscript and signed a contract with Fireship Press.  Barbados Bound was published in July, 2012.   The story is essentially the same as Star-Crossed, but I was able to correct a few anachronisms, introduce a minor characterwho appears in the sequel -- and add back a little salty language taken out of the first edition.  At last both books are under the same publisher, or aboard the same ship:  Fireship Press.

     It all started with a ship and an adventure -- and the adventure continues.  Bob and I just returned from a four-day sail on Topaz, our 36-foot sloop.  Sailing inspires me because the sea is aforce to be reckoned with. The sea connects us, it covers most of the earth, it is a portal to the past. It provides a rich backdrop for a novel because of its power and its historical importance. The sea offeres both freedom and imprisonment, it nurtures and destroys.  I both love the sea and fear it, and I hope that conflict is apparent in my novels.  Conflict, external and internal, is what drives my writing.

Linda Collison

www.lindacollison.com

Sea of Words; charting a course from imagination to publication 

Patricia MacPherson Nautical Adventures

Serendipity by Sarah Bryant

“Where do you get your ideas?” is probably the most common question people ask me when I tell them that I’m a writer, and it’s definitely the most difficult to answer. It’s not so much that I don’t know (although at some point, flash-in-the-pan inspiration is always a factor) but that the origins of my books are usually so distant, so mundane, or so apparently unrelated to the finished product, that people either don’t believe me, or are disillusioned by the utter banality of the truth.
“Serendipity” is no exception. Its point of origin is seventeen years ago, my second year of university, when I was a competitive dinghy sailor. I woke up one morning from a dream about an old white wooden sailboat named “Heaven”, wanting to write about it, and sailing’s addictive quality, and of course, being a rose-tinted twenty year old, about love. The result was an abysmal short story about a girl who loved sailboats, and a boy who loved her. It sank into my “stories” folder without ever seeing the light of day, and I forgot about it until the following year, when my first real relationship ended in a spectacular mess.
Among other fallout, I quit sailing. I had to, if I didn’t want to see the boy in question every day. I missed it at least as much as I missed him, but there was no question of going back to either one. So what to do with the sudden, gaping hole in my life? Write about it, of course! I dusted off the sailboat story, trashed most of it, but kept the two characters and a few sentences belonging to each of them. Then I started listening. The guy was silent. But the girl had a lot to say about love and loss and disillusionment. I started writing.
It wasn’t until the following summer that Meredith’s pages of broken-hearted rumination began to take shape as a novel. But oddly, it had nothing at all to do with Meredith, or even sailboats. I was working that summer on a small teaching farm – a little bit of the nineteenth century marooned in the Massachusetts suburbs. Before I knew it, a world was forming in my head: one which took shape around that farm, as it might have been in a different time or place. And out of it, unexpectedly, the silent man began to speak. He was intelligent and wry and as-yet-inexplicably damaged. I put Meredith aside, and started writing Silence. I knew that they were connected, but how? Writing a novel about a sailing prodigy and a farmer seemed like a fool’s errand.
The answer came out of nowhere. Well actually it came from Adam, a friend I’d made at that farm, who announced one day, “My new favourite word is ‘serendipity’.” I asked him why, and he said, “Because serendipity explains everything.” I said, “Right, whatever,” but I found the word knocking around my head the next few days as I demonstrated the joys of cow milking and composting to a lot of hot, bored suburban children.
And then Adam took me to see his family’s farm. It had a huge old red barn, intriguingly empty. It was like a cathedral. It was big enough to hold a boat. And that was it, the flash in the pan: Silence was building a boat in his barn! And sooner or later he was going to need help; enter Meredith. Serendipity, indeed.
I’d like to say it all went smoothly from there, but that quote about love’s course hold true for novels too. I took “Serendipity” with me onto a writing masters program, thinking it was great. The tutor hated it, and did her level best to fail me. A year later, I was lucky enough to find an agent who loved it, and I thought I was sorted. Wrong again: the agent couldn’t sell it, and ultimately gave up on it. So did I.
I wrote other books, found publishers for them. It wasn’t until I was writing my third historical novel that “Serendipity” got its Eureka moment. I was bogged down in that third book, with two small children and too little time to do the research it required. Then something strange happened: I was slogging away at 19th century Edinburgh, but it was Meredith and Silence who kept speaking to me. And they were saying, “When are you ever going to figure it out? Our story belongs here!”
I still can’t believe that when I emailed my editor and said, “Um, about that book you’re expecting…is it okay if I write a completely different one?” she said yes without hesitation.
I took “Serendipity” back out, rewrote the first section as set in the 1890s rather than 1990s, and everything just fell perfectly into place. I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to see that this story had always belonged in an earlier era. At long last, despite myself (and with a little help from Bob Dylan – just read it, you’ll see!) I knew exactly how to make “Serendipity” into the book it was meant to be. And if it took me seventeen years? Well, better later than never!

http://www.sarahbryant.net/