An inner glimpse of the author mind at work: this was a story I had no intention of writing. I’ve been hard at work on Pirate Throne, as well as a couple of other works in progress unrelated to space pirates, when an opportunity came up to write a short story for a project. Ultimately, I didn’t end up joining the project, but this is what evolved from me dreaming up a space pirates short story for it.
Andromeda Jones and the other characters in this piece — which was supposed to be a short story and turned into a novella — are no one you’ve met before. But the universe for my space pirates is vast, and filled with basically endless characters I could tell stories about. That’s one of the reasons for Swag Stories to exist. It gives me the flexibility to explore ideas like this. And who knows? Maybe someday one of them will result in a whole new series.
I have no idea where Annie came from or how I ended up writing a story about a scavenger who makes her living by sorting scrap, but there you go. Sometimes the writer brain is a strange and mysterious place.
So, while I had no intention of ever writing this story, it turns out I really enjoyed Annie as an MC. She couldn’t be more different from Mercy — well, they both have trust issues, but other than that I find them very opposite personalities. And then my cover artist, Rebecca Frank, hit it out of the park with this amazing cover. It makes me wish I was writing more for Annie and her crew. At the moment, this is a standalone tale. You can enjoy it without reading a single other space pirates book. Or, you can enjoy it as extra flavoring to the overall universe. The choice is yours. I hope you all love reading it as much as I did writing it.