Pirates vs. RL

Happy New Year, everyone!

Seven years ago today I posted my first story on the internet, the first seventeen chapters of Harry & the Pirate. I remember how excited and nervous I was, and how thrilled when PotC fans began reading and leaving comments. A few days later, erinrua, captain of blackpearlsails, found the story and added it to her great recs page, and then invited me to join the Black Pearl Sails Yahoo group. To say I was thrilled would be putting it very mildly.

It's been an exciting seven years since that New Years Day 2004, and there have been many changes in the PotC fandom and in my own life. Yet here I am, ready to post what will probably be the last multi-chaptered addition to the Harry & the Pirate universe, twenty chapters, one per day for the next twenty days. Stories featuring OFC's don't appeal to everyone, particularly when said females are involved with the lead canon character. Yet a number of PotC fans have read and enjoyed the Harry & the Pirate stories, and have very kindly encouraged me to write more, and this is my gift to them. It's also been a very special gift to my dear friend and beta reader, hereswith, who wanted more about Tom and Anne.

Harry & the Pirate is a post-CotBP A/U and entirely ignores the story and character development of Dead Man's Chest and At World's End. The stories also include many original characters besides Harry, and tend to be somewhat complicated plotwise. But I am hoping that Blood and Treasure has enough explanatory information even for first time readers, and I also hope that those already familiar with this universe will enjoy Jack and Harry's adventures in England, where most of this story is set (and I apologize in advance if I've gotten any details about the setting outrageously wrong -- I hesitated to impose on any of my English friends by asking for assistance in "Brit-picking" the 40K words of this story so there may be errors here and there, though I've done my best, and these are, after all, based on a canon that features an undead monkey).

So, without further ado, here we go...






( Chapter One: Farewell to Singaraja )

When I saw that this week's drabble challenge prompt was 'Inherit' I had to write this little prologue to Harry & the Pirate VI: Blood and Treasure. I'm up to chapter sixteen in writing it, and I intend to post a chapter a day beginning on 1-1-11, which is the 7th anniversary of the series.

Harry & the Pirate is an A/U sequel to Curse of the Black Pearl, and the first 200,000 words or so (four chaptered stories and many associated shorter works) were written before Dead Man's Chest came out to thoroughly "Joss" both my plot and character development. If you are a first time reader you might bear that in mind, and also note that this drabble is spoilery for the series as a whole (though I'll probably put a synopsis of the series at the front of the first chapter of B&T for new readers that prefer to skip wading through the preceding stories).

Many thanks to hereswith for taking the time to look this over.

( The solicitor’s letter had taken months to reach him... )