With great joy, I am thrilled to announce that our story, The Pirate’s Bride, is completely done, and we are in the process of making it available to our readers! It will be available this coming Tuesday, as God wills, from the link on the landing page. What a whirlwind of a ride this process has been!
For those of you who have been along with us for at least part of the ride, I wanted to first of all say, Thank you for your prayers! This is the hardest story I have ever had to write, and there are different reasons for that.
One, God used this story to teach me some spiritual lessons. And two, when it got psychologically hard (sad!), He wouldn’t let me quit, because it is His story. (Don’t worry, it ends well!)
There are no spoilers in this post, but I will explain a little bit about what inspired the story, some of how we put it together and illustrated it, and finally why we are giving it away. I also wanted to thank some dear friends who helped us.
The background: The story is based on a true story from our family history. We were toward the end of our active researching phase of genealogy, when I turned to a neglected part of our family tree. The story I uncovered haunted me, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind for years. (Since 2017.)
It wasn’t the worst story we uncovered, but it was the only one where someone was executed. The discovery caused me a lot of grief: I really didn’t want it to be true. As I processed it, I explored different ideas using fiction. “What if–” I asked myself. “And what if (something else)?”
One day I discovered that I knew how to fix that sad, true story through fiction. The idea came all at once and everything clicked into place. It was like I had dumped a puzzle on the table, and had been turning the pieces for a while, when I suddenly saw the picture they made. I began to write the rough draft sometime before 2021, and had it “done,” toward the middle of the year. But as time went on, God kept showing me new ways to look at specific parts of it, and finally, I put it aside and began to work on The Courage to Move.
After we published The Courage to Move in 2023, I started to get interested in The Pirate’s Bride once more. The break from the story was useful, for when I dusted it off and took another look at it, I realized what went wrong. I changed the envelope story completely, and rewrote a major scene with a completely different outcome. I also exchanged a main character, and changed the setting. And again, I thought it was “finished” almost a year ago.
Someone suggested illustrating it, and when Beau said he would help me, I decided to go ahead. I had always loved old stories like “Treasure Island,” and “Kidnapped,” but how much fun would they have been without the illustrations? While working on the illustrations brought new learning opportunities, it also forced me to think in a 3-D fashion. What did the buildings look like? What did they wear? And so the rewrites continued.
I say that Beau “helped me.” But he really did the bulk of the work. If you read his Dr. Dumb comics, you’ll notice his style in most of these drawings. His strength is in his imagination, and his ability to construct a scene out of thin air. I could not have done this without him. Notice the details in the scene below: All of this was straight from his imagination. The fence posts are even shaped differently, just as a worn fence would be in real life.
The Lord was showing me that fiction stories are only believable when they tell the truth. Yes, it’s an imaginary story, but does it tell the truth? Do the characters act the way that kind of person really would if that situation happened in real life? Keep in mind that truth really is stranger than fiction. Telling the truth can mean that it gets crazier and wilder. But I found that every change to make it more truthful (as wild as it was) only made it more believable.
Lots of things happened during the writing of this story that showed me I was being led by God. I can’t go into it now, before you have read it, because it would spoil some of the surprises. But I did document them, and hope to eventually write about how amazingly God confirmed His leading.
Along the way, a few people outside our family gave it a read and made some suggestions. And every few months, Tony would read the whole thing out to us, while we made notes about corrections that needed to be made or fresh ideas that we had during his reading. If you download the audiobook, you’ll see how Tony’s voice can take you completely out of your world into another place and time, and the transport is so smooth and gentle that you never notice the lift-off. His willingness to read it out loud gave us some distance from the story so that we could see it better, so I thank him for that. He also made the suggestion for one of the best lines in the story.
A word about the illustrations: This is a first for both Beau and I, because we have never done illustrations (except for covers) before. Beau has told stories through comic drawings, but in that case, the drawings come first, and the text gets filled in afterward in support of the visuals. But these illustrations had to support the story first, and help tell it. We had to cut some very cool drawings because they didn’t serve the story. (But they are so beautiful. . .maybe we can use them another way, like a blog post!)
We had to come up with a look for several different characters, and so we gathered and combined references to create something new. We used images of famous people (Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, Hugh Jackman, Sinead O’Connor, Scott Baio), and took inspiration from the construction workers on our street. Tony, Beau and I even posed for some of the reference photos. One illustration of a clergyman in the story was based on an image of a famous pastor from the 1890’s, Edwin Abbot Abbot, the author of the amazing tiny math book, Flatland. (You may not be able to pick them out, because we deliberately didn’t make it look like the person, but we used their nose, or their ear, or their hairline.)
The book, Flatland, explores ideas about real physical dimensions in space using fictional lands: Pointland (a world of points), Lineland (a world of lines), and Flatland (a world of planes). (It’s an excellent example of telling the truth through fiction!) But thinking of “Lineland” reminded me of one of those confirmations from God I mentioned earlier.
One night, when I was working on a drawing, I just couldn’t get the perspective right. I drew and erased, drew and erased. Finally, I stopped and prayed for help. When I opened my eyes and went back to the drawing, I could see a slight line, like an erased pencil line, that showed me where to draw. It wasn’t a line that I had made and erased. It wasn’t a physical line at all; instead, it was like a fine shadow that you don’t see after you blink. I have never had that happen in over 18 years of drawing. God helped me, just like I asked. This experience also made me realize that it was God’s will for us to complete the illustrations. (I was so discouraged!)
There are twenty-five illustrations that we ended up using. We also used image software (GIMP) to fix things and to blend some drawings together (Tony helped with this!) Beau is very skilled in inking the pencil drawings, so he did the majority of that, and I inked a lot and helped a little (wink). We all learned a lot! (Many thanks to our friend, William, for the gift card so we could buy extra pens!)
Many of our artistic decisions were made with an eye on how it would be published. Tony is our layout guy, and prepared the PDF and did the book layout, including sizing and placing illustrations. He is also our printer and bookbinder. We are publishing this first run in-house.
Writing a long fiction story is a little like building a house. In the beginning, you rough it in, decide where the outside walls are, plan the rooms, etc. As the project continues, the work becomes more and more refined. Finally, the finish work is done. That is where the beauty of the home starts to shine.
This was like that. It was a lot of work to “rough-in” the story. It went through radical changes, and had to be rebuilt a time or two, but it is sturdy now, because it tells the truth. I have spent a lot of time daydreaming about this story, living in it, in a way. The Lord would wake me in the night to remind me to add connections or to wrap up loose ends. And one day, all of that stopped, and I felt like it was done.
Any mistakes in it are mine. But this story really belongs to God, and that is why I want to share it freely. He didn’t charge me for it. “Freely you have received, freely give,” Jesus said. He inspired me to “fix” our history and then animated and empowered the process. After all, He is the only One who can make all things new. We have all worked hard to get out of the way of the truth of this story, and we pray it blesses everyone who reads it!
And for my dear friends who got a copy too early, I hope you get a chance to read this one, and to know that we will never forget your prayer, support and encouragement! God bless you!
It will be available this coming Tuesday!
The Fullers Four 