18, 19, 22 👀
What sets your story apart from others in its genre?
Gosh I don't know, this question makes me just go 'BUT WHAT IF IT'S ALL DERIVATIVE?'. I think, perhaps, I'm more interested in historical logistics even though it's ultimately a supernatural ghost story. Like, I make a point to include how the amount of provisions that will last four months on a ship, and what people are paid, and how whalers got letters from home, and what the hierarchy and hunting process is in a whale boat, and what random tinctures were given for what random ailments. Act I is a lot of Logistics.
What was the first idea that eventually turned into the story? How much has it changed?
Lol in 2014 I made a trio of shitty rich people. I made them shipowners in the yankee whaling industry because that history interested me, but ultimately it was an interpersonal drawing room drama about these terrible sibling capitalists who couldn't communicate with each other. And I felt like I had to make too many historical reaches to make it work, that the story being centered on them and sympathetic to them undermined the themes that I ultimately wanted to play with that were surfacing, and that as I also got more frustrated with the Real World I just....couldn't care about the emotional turmoil of robber barons lol. So I trashed it years later. And now within the past year it is revived anew. With almost all of the earlier characters gone, with the exception of two whalers, one of whom is the story's main character now. It's centered entirely on a whaleship, on the drama of the whaleship, and is also a Spooky Ghost Story.
Give three words that describe your story’s atmosphere. Greasy, dark, and windy.
