Little Brown Boats of Fortune

I put it off for too long, so when the moment arrived I jumped on it, writing Little Brown Boats of Fortune (working title).

 It is action/adventure, historic fiction and I am trying the traditional route of getting it published, sending query letters to literary agents, and not paying money I don't have to get it done that way. I battle ageism, and living in southeast Georgia, a pathetic job market.

Little Brown Boats started out as a book about the very deadly trans-Pacific Manila galleon voyages, roughly between 1565 and 1815. However, research lead to an even more intriguing story involving high-level international trade, piracy, revolutionary wars, famous and oddball figures of the Napoleonic-era in the Americas and Pacific.

Little Brown Boats is designed to be a swift read with less than 18,000 words in 31 chapters. It's style might remind some of  Patrick O'Brian's naval fiction books.

The main character is a Philippines village small boat fisherman, carted off in impressment, a nice word for seaborne slavery, by a Dutch warship. He finally goes around the world before painfully seeing his familiar, but changed family a few years later.

He survived a Manila galleon voyage in the process, and eventually another going back to the Americas. He arrives in war-weary Mexico in 1813, and travels with a group to Veracruz, where he works on a Spanish ship to New Orleans where he and an old friend jump ship.

The rest of the story, and his entanglements, leave room for a series, or second edition. Maybe more. So, please wish great things for my query letters, and let me know if you might know any interested literary agents...

I have other books in the works, including one started in China before I left in 2016. It's completion was interrupted by fatherhood, employment, unemployment, a health bump, and life.