Good morning, Tracy. How are you doing today? Hi am good,
just good. Here you are with this gigantic, oh my god, the
book that people are going to be reading. You've got a production coming,
I mean it should be. I'm fantastic and I want to share it with
the world. Right, You're right, I am fantastic. You are correct.
You've put something together here that I'll bet you that nobody ten, fifteen,
twenty years ago would have predicted. And yet here it comes, It's
flowed through you, and now it's reaching us as viewers as well as readers.
Right yeah, I mean, you know, I think it's just luck.
And you know, being in the right place at the right time kind
of that has gotten me to where I am with this particular story. Being
in the right place at the right time. Now now you have my attention
in the way that that because I mean, as a writer, so many
writers are you know, they're told no, no, no, But but
now they they they're saying yes to you. And and and here it comes,
you know, pirates and mermaids and and the one thing that that's always
been fascinating is that we love the bad boys and we love the bad girls
as well. What is it when when they get together like that, the
pirates and the mermaids. Oh yeah, I mean yeah, that's definitely a
popular pairing. I have learned pirates and mermaids. I think you know a
lot of kids really really love pirates. They love this idea of um,
you know, like the kind of traditional swashbuckling pirate. They love how pirates
they are and gir and that sort of thing. And they also love the
fantasy a mermaid and mermaids being these these creatures that can really do anything they
want right under the sea. So they seem like a really good pairing because
of course they both live out on the ocean. But what I tried to
do with mermaid and pirate was kind of introduced the idea that, yes,
they both love the ocean there you know, they live out on the ocean.
But they really do come from two different worlds. So you have mermaid
who has like her own language actually has the sort of watery which and pirate
have his own language. And what happens when the two of them come together
and cannot who I communicate even though they find themselves in a difficult position together
Like what happened? That's that's really what I was going for. How did
you create those those two personalities, because I mean, I mean it's I
mean, did you bring them together as a collaboration right on the spot or
did you write out each part and then and then figure out a way that
where the editor could do that? So funny enough, I tend to have
a lot of toys in my office, and I switch out my toys all
the time, you know, and like how different toys around because I have
so many that I can't have them all in the office all the time save
the time because my office is kind of small. So one day I actually
had a stuffed mermaid and a stuffed pirate on the chair in my office,
on an arm chair in my office, and I looked at them and I
thought to myself, huh, I wonder what would happen if the two of
them had to try to communicate. And it occurred to me almost immediately that
they would not have the same language. That's actually how the story started.
It started with two stuffies on my armchair in my office. I had the
two of them immediately from the very beginning, and then it was just like
working out, like, you know, what kind of problems would these two
have together, you know what kind of trouble to these two creatures get into
over the course of the story. So it was a matter of figuring out
all of the little scrapes they could get into. But also the funnest part
for me was figuring out their language and like how they try to communicate with
each other and how it just does not work ever, because they don't speak
the same tongue.