She started as an idea for a character for a roleplaying game that never ended up going ahead. When I was creating the character, this backstory hit and I found myself writing pages and pages about how she’d run away to sea, expecting a great, romantic adventure … only for her husband to die in his first battle in the most unheroic way possible. Definitely not a fairy tale ending to that relationship.

But then, I think happily ever afters depend on where you end the story, don’t they? Vice’s story didn’t end with her husband’s death, as you’ve seen. You can read more about her past in Across Dark Seas, the exclusive full length ebook I give to my newsletter subscribers as a free gift: https://www.claresager.com/bbsback

That first idea for the character of Vice was some years ago now, but I kept the notes ready to write about her some day.

After the second Counterfeit Contessa book, A Sleuth & a Charlatan, I wanted a bit of a break from that series—it’s a mammoth-sized book (twice the length of BBS) and quite dark at times. I loved it, but I wanted to write something different—more light-hearted, shorter.

Guess who poked her head up out of the crow’s nest and gave me a wave. (And a grin and a wink!)

Maybe it was watching Black Sails on TV or playing Assassin’s Creed Black Flag some years earlier, but I had a real hankering to tell a pirate story.

And Vice was pretty insistent.

Now you’ve read BBS, you know how tenacious she is, how confident she is that things will work out as long as you give it a go.

And I could kind of see her point. I love reading and learning—I think that’s part of what I love about writing stories, it’s the perfect excuse to research new topics and keep learning. I didn’t have to know every single thing about sailing a tallship—I wasn’t writing an instruction manual. What I did need to know, I could learn.

Vice added that what I didn’t know I could bluff. In Knigh’s words: That woman!

So I bought a stack of books on pirates and sailing ships, I bookmarked gods know how many websites, and I drew myself little diagrams of different parts of ships and the names for directions as an aide memoir. And I let Vice have her way.

I’m glad I did.