Picture of the Day: 

Standing under a tiger at Busch Gardens! RAWR!

Quote of the Day: 

"A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway."

-Junot Diaz

Hello again, my dearest readers! I truly must confess this: I do not think I have been this on top of things since my freshman year of college. Allow me to explain. In the past four days, I have written three eight page papers, done a take home quiz, and now have an evening of rest before I receive my final take-home exam from one class, and get to work on studying for my Film and Culture exam. I will be finished by Tuesday. Completely. Forever. 

You know...until I finally decide to go back to school to get a masters in something. Or, I go into teaching. You must be wondering what happened about the class that was going to prevent me from graduating. The answer is simple: I have not the slightest idea. However, with the help of extra credit, a wonderful final test and a fantastic final paper (fingers crossed on that one; it has not been graded yet!) I can scrape out a high C. 

While a C is not something to be proud of necessarily, there is an old adage my campus minister taught me: "Cs get degrees." Yeah; I never thought I would come to accept a C with no protest, but God does work miracles, and in funny ways to boot! 

Well, in celebration of the nearing end, I would like to give you something to read that I have been working on, or at least mention an idea of something that is in the works; unfortunately, I really have not had time to work on anything--so instead, I want to talk about naming things. I know I have already posted about this a while back, but in this case I want to tie it directly in with my pirate novel. The names of navy and pirate ships!

Now, I struggle with naming things. I really, really, really do. That being said, I want every single name in my arsenal of ships to be down-right memorable and catchy. So, with a determinedness that bordered lunacy, I set out on the internet to find ship names. (I mentioned before, also, how I stumbled across the Happy Delivery during that exploration. Which has to be simultaneously the worst and best pirate ship name ever. I did manage to come up with significantly better names for my own ships, though. If you would believe it.) I also was determined to not use any name that was already used by a real pirate ship, or fantasy one. Originality was key.

There are a bunch of pirate ships in my novel, as well as a bunch of navy ships. So, needless to say, I needed quite a few names. I will not bore you with listing all of them. Instead, I would like to talk about my absolute favorite one I have come up with for the navy. I am quite proud of it, really.

So, I would like to introduce you to her. Meet The Garroter; the royal ship of the king's navy. She is a large ship, based on the ship design from our world known as "ship-of-the-line."

So, she would look something like this: 

Except without the British flag. 

Why the design? I chose a ship-of-the-line design for this particular ship because it was the baddest warship on the seven seas. It would hold a crew of nearly four hundred men. Oh. And it would hold a whole bunch of canons. In fact, this ship was designed to hold the most fire-power. The hull is not necessarily beautiful, but I suppose in my world, I can add some of the carrack's physical design.

Because of her size, she would be slow. So, I am thinking she is probably one of the only ships her size in Veliar's fleet. The rest of the fleet would be comprised of smaller frigates built for speed but still with firepower. Because of her speed, The Garroter is not a ship that actively pursues the pirates that come into Veliar's waters (she would never be able to keep up with them, no matter how good the wind was), but rather a warship specifically designed to meet others in combat. So, if the pirates happened to be outright attacking the kingdom, ransacking the civilians on land and therefore not able to flee when The Garroter approached, The Garroter would stand a good chance at sinking the pirate carrack due to its overwhelming amount of gunnery. 

This, as you can imagine, does not happen too often. And when it does, it happens to only the worst of the pirates. The Garroter is really designed and used for flat out confrontations between the other kingdoms around Veliar (say...Bellumar, or elsewhere) and only sometimes used for excursions to take care of pirates from the freelands.

The Garroter is specifically manned by the Commodore, and the only vessel type that the king will sail on (this is because of its hardy structure and gunpower.). Obviously, if things looked really bad for a ship like this, the king would be moved to a smaller frigate and sailed away quickly.

The Garroter is also the ship that our young Liam got to play on as he learned about dealing with the navy. (In case you cannot remember who Liam is, he is the prince of Veliar!) He knows that ship very well from all the shenanigans he pulled while a young child, and its crew is the best of the best of the navy. Jarek, Liam's friend, is a gunner on The Garroter himself, having proven himself a fantastic talent at manning canons. 

There you have it. Meet the Queen of the Royal Fleet. 

Oh, and in case you were wondering what The Garroter means, a good synonym for it is "The Hangman". 

Yeah, I know it's epic.