Harry the Pirate Captain

Harry and the Kraken is live on Amazon. Its been a long journey to get to this point. Well isn’t that cliche. Actually it was a lot easier than I thought it would be.

Let me start at the beginning. The story started as a story for my grandson on Thanksgiving 2022. He asked me to tell him a story. For some reason I didn’t start the normal two minute story but started to tell him a longer one. Before I started the story I asked him what it should be about. He said a pirate and a kraken (I think he had seen some cartoons about those two subjects). I then asked him what the captain’s name should be. I was expecting him to say Jack but he surprised me and said Harry. I started to tell him a story and tried to be more descriptive than I normally was when I told him a story. As I was telling him the story it started to get longer and longer. I got to the point that in the book is the end of chapter two when we needed to leave. I promised him I would finish the story and send it via email to his mother. It was about a week before I finally sat down with the intention of writing the rest of the story. As I started, I realized I needed to start from the beginning so that I could re-orient my self. I started writing and was at a point that it wouldn’t be appropriate to continue in an email. I switched to pages and kept writing. I finally sent what would eventually become the first three chapters of the book and continued writing. I did a Philip as Jack’s mother says, which means I got obsessive.

In the end, I wrote seventeen chapters when I thought I was done. By then I was having friends and family read it. They told me it ended abruptly. So I went back and continued trying to write a good ending. At about that time, I listened to a vlog by Kiri Jorgensen at chicken scratch books about how a character should come to a realization. I incorporated those ideas into a chapter and added some additional details for the ending and ended up with 20 chapters.

During the course of writing the book, Jack created some illustrations that I incorporated into the book.

I was in the middle of editing the book when I had a few kids I know read it to get their feedback. The brothers, Colson and Mason, having read it, wanted to contribute their illustrations.

Besides the three boys, I had the assistance of a beta reader and editor on Fiverr. I also had the cover on Amazon designed by another Fiverr contractor.

The point of the book was a story for my grandson. Since I have no patience, and I wanted to have it done for Christmas I decided not to pursue traditional publishing. That’s when I had the cover designed. From that point, with the help of Vellum, I was able to put together a book I could upload to Kindle Direct Publishing. Then there you have it a book on Amazon.