Prepare for Pirates!

Preparing to write my Pirate Women series was not something I approached casually. If I was going to tell the stories of real women who lived, fought, and survived in one of the harshest environments imaginable, I wanted to do it properly.

That meant research. A lot of it.

Before I wrote a single chapter, I spent months immersing myself in the world of the Golden Age of Piracy. I wanted to understand not just the legends we all grew up hearing about, but the daily realities of life at sea. What did pirates eat? How were ships organized? What weapons did they actually use? How did crews function? What kind of personalities rose to leadership in such dangerous and unstable conditions?

One of the books that proved invaluable during that research process was Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly.

Like many readers, I had grown up surrounded by romantic pirate imagery. Treasure maps, black sails, dramatic sword fights, and colorful personalities. But Cordingly’s work pulls back the curtain and shows both sides of that world. The romance is there, certainly, but so is the grit, the danger, and the sheer unpredictability of life on the open sea.

His detailed explanations of pirate ships, weapons, tactics, and crew structures helped me build a mental framework for how these worlds actually operated. When you’re writing historical fiction, those details matter more than people often realize. Even if they don’t appear directly on the page, they influence how characters move through their environment, how they react to danger, and how they survive.

Perhaps most importantly for my work, Cordingly does not overlook the remarkable women who sailed during this period. Figures like Mary Read and Anne Bonny often appear in pirate lore almost as curiosities, but understanding the broader context of piracy made it clear just how extraordinary their lives truly were. These were women operating in a brutal, male-dominated world where survival required intelligence, adaptability, and courage.

For someone preparing to write a series focused specifically on female pirates, that context was essential. I wanted my characters to feel grounded in the reality of their time, not simply placed into an adventure setting.

Research books like Under the Black Flag helped me do exactly that. The more I studied the period, the more fascinated I became with the real stories hidden beneath the legends. The women who sailed under false names. The ones who fought alongside men. The ones who navigated a world that rarely made room for them, yet left their mark on history anyway. Those stories deserve to be told.

Writing the Pirate Women series has been one of the most rewarding projects of my life. Every book begins the same way: with curiosity, with research, and with a deep respect for the real people whose lives inspire the fiction.

History, after all, is far more adventurous than anything we could invent.