Never would I have thought that my to-read book stack would be loaded with nonfiction accounts of both The Golden Age of Piracy and the Age of Exploration.

My fascination with these eras began a few years back, when a friend gifted me a thrilling read called The Republic of Pirates. It’s a captivating tale that weaves in the histories of famous pirates like Blackbeard, Black Sam Bellamy, and so many others, telling their stories to the backdrop of this surge of piracy and the formation of a literal pirate island in the early 1700s. I won’t go too far down the rabbit hole, but it was easily one of the most gripping nonfiction books I have ever read, and it created a complex, rich, and complicated understanding of the many different types of pirates who existed in that era.

Fast-forward a couple of years and another of couple pirate books later, and my wife and I are at a maritime museum in San Diego. The big draw of this museum is the collection of ships from WWII and later, but I’m hung up on maps and accounts from the Age of Exploration. The peril. The danger. The toll that life at sea took every single day and the fabled promises of riches that kept explorers going.

Right now, I’m halfway through Over the Edge of the World, an account of Magellan’s voyage around the globe. It’s gripping, mortifying, and feeds into the unrest, turmoil, and struggle that would eventually lead into the Golden Age of Piracy, from a socio-political level between the church and rival countries down to the day-to-day hardships of life at sea.

And I am enthralled. While simultaneously diving into Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction catalog, I’m often comparing and contrasting the dreams of the future to life at sea during the Age of Exploration.

This is a long-winded way of saying, my next project is the brainchild of both of these thoughts stealing my brain’s bandwidth. The new project partly a sequel to the robot novella that I’m still shopping around. It’s a sequel in the sense that this project and the robot novella exist in the same universe and two characters will overlap, but the main focus on this new project is different.

Different main character. Different part of the galaxy. Different story. Right now, I’m calling it “Project Bellamy,” and it’s a story that weaves in space exploration and piracy, but it’s also about impermanence, about trying to get back to a place that no longer exists. Because things change, and with the march of time, everything we love can only exist for a moment. We can choose to love it in the moment or not, and when it’s gone, all we’re left with is our memories.

I’m still in the early stages of writing, so this may change. If you asked me three years ago if I would find myself writing about space pirates, I might have laughed. But here I am, living in this moment, synthesizing everything I’ve been reading and obsessing over into a tale about how we deal with the impermanent state of being.

What are you working on? Let me know in the comments.

We’re all in this together,
Scott

P.S. I’m still regularly writing comic book reviews over at The Batman Universe. I also regularly join The Batman Universe podcast as co-host, and I’ve started collecting my Batman creator interviews. If you want to read any of my short stories, I created a Short Fiction Collection just for you.