SUBSTACK WRITER RETURNS
Reports run-in with pirates
Ahoy, landlubbers! Prepare your monocles and adjust your quills, for the illustrious, and, dare I say, slightly damp, author FantasticallyFlawed is back from the high seas. They have returned not with chests of gold, but with a trove of anecdotes that are, frankly, a bit of a letdown.
"The sea, my dear fellow, is a boundless expanse of poetic inspiration," they declared, a single, unconvincing parrot perched on their shoulder. "One must simply embrace the... unconventional."
Flawed, a person who once considered a typo in their manuscript an act of high piracy, now regales their dinner guests with tales of swashbuckling. The only problem is, their stories are suspiciously similar to a poorly-researched Wikipedia entry.
“The first mate, a brutish man named Silas, was a paragon of nautical cruelty,” they explained, waving a fork for emphasis. “He would make us swab the deck at dawn, and woe betide anyone who left a streak! Truly a tyrannical villain.”
An anonymous crew member, who wishes to remain unnamed and is currently scrubbing the deck of Flawed’s writing study, offered a different perspective. “Silas? The man was a stickler for hygiene. Called us his ‘Cleanliness Crew.’ They had a whole system of color-coded rags. It was less ‘AARRGHH’ and more ‘A-C-H-OOO, pass me a tissue, I think I’m getting a cold.’”
Flawed’s epic of mutiny also falls short of the mark. “We rose up against Captain Blackheart, a man with a gaze as black as the midnight ocean! We fought with cutlasses and fists, a maelstrom of steel and sweat!”
The truth? The crew voted to replace Captain Blackheart after he insisted on a mandatory team-building exercise involving a trust fall from the mainmast. The vote was unanimous. Blackheart now runs a successful teahouse in Tortuga.
"The real treasure," Flawed mused, "is the shared human experience. The bonds of brotherhood forged in the crucible of maritime life.”
It’s been said that Flawed’s next book, tentatively titled Plunder and Prose: A Gentleman's Guide to the High Seas, is due out next spring. We wish them all the best, and hope they remember to return the eye patch he borrowed from the neighbor’s cat.