The TLDR: A sapphic pirate fantasy romance novel that started off as the fourth in a series of disconnected fantasy romances, and then took over my life. Starring good girls gone bad, the ‘Pirate Queen’ Captain Kallista Audax and magic healing nun/doctor Sister/Doctor Eugenia ‘Geni’ Philistos, the book/series draws a lot of my interests and values together under one roof.
Current status: Planning for Draft Three Revision
Lore Drops is a series here and on my main site where I do one big long post as a FAQ about my various projects over time. As time goes by and my writing career history gets more and more convoluted, this provides people who feel like they have come in halfway with a way to catch back up into the conversation. These Lore Drops are living documents which I will add to as things occur to me. Feel free to ask questions, and watch as the answers become part of the ever-growing lore.
Plot preview:
Kallista Audax is a proud naval captain until a trap set to ensnare her, where she witnesses imperial injustice, turns her against her homeland. She becomes a pirate, and her loyal crew goes with her.
Eugenia Philistos is a divorced medical doctor turned nun who helps run a secret reproductive health clinic under the nose of the repressive government in Seraphinople. She needs to journey to find more contraceptive herb, so takes a risky post as a ship’s doctor. But this means leaving behind her teenage children.
A year on from her defection, Kallista meets Geni. What starts as a one night stand turns into an accidental kidnapping, which in turn becomes a fraught working relationship where Kallista agrees to help Geni find the herb and Geni becomes the ship’s permanent doctor. But it also means Kallista has to impose her rule: she does not sleep with members of her crew.
What will become of the spark between them? And can they overcome the overwhelming struggles that beset them on every side?
Origin:
For my fourth draft manuscript set in Ao Rakona (and the first one written solely in it, and not originally written in my spouse’s RPG world Tirenia and later converted over, unlike the ones preceeding) I knew I wanted to write something about a captain and a doctor, along the lines of Master and Commander. I was tempted to go naval, but I was also tempted to go piratical. Furthermore, I was inspired by the will-they-won’t-they of Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The inconsistency in how that relationship was treated over the seven seasons, four movies and the sequel series Picard was always a source of frustration to me. But I didn’t want to do a straight couple, so I made the best possible substitution for my queer little heart: instead of pairing my Beverly Crusher analogue Geni with a Picard type, I went with my favourite Star Trek captain, Kathryn Janeway, as my inspiration for Kallista. (note: the characters have moved on a lot from these initial inspirations! But you can absolutely see the traces still – coffee, anyone?)
After building myself this playlist, I began. The playlist is really just a lot of vibes that make sense to me personally, and I don’t think it will work for everyone. But if you want to know the songs that my head goes straight to when I think of each character, it’s:
Kallista – Through the Eyes of Ruby by Smashing Pumpkins
Geni – Run Run Run by Goldenhorse
Further below I’ll call out a few more songs that make me think of specific moments.
First Draft:
I began drafting the first draft (entitled ‘Captain, My Captain’ back then because it just seemed suitably melodramatic to me, despite not knowing the origin of the reference at that time) on Waitangi Day, 6th February 2024. For those of you not in Aotearoa NZ, a quick explainer: Waitangi Day is when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840. That marks the point where the British Crown could officially rule in NZ… ah, but, the idea was, they were being invited to rule over their unruly subjects who were settling in NZ. They were being invited to share, to basically be another nation of peoples living alongside, as iwi lived side by side already. Surprise, surprise, nearly two centuries of treaty breaches have followed, and the Crown now hold dominion over all of New Zealand.
So perhaps it follows that I wrote about a noble captain forced by her ethics to turncoat against a government which was not upholding its part of the bargain.
(I joke about this often, but it’s true: every now and again I wonder, am I going too far with my misogynistic bigoted treaty-breaking bad guys? Then I pop my head up and look at world and national politics and go, Nope! I’m good!)
I took a break in late March 2024 to give birth to my second child, but 12 days later I was back at it, unable to resist the siren song. I finished the manuscript in April, with my newborn baby asleep on my lap for most of that second half of drafting.
Other inspirations that fed into this first draft:
- I was watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine during the months that I drafted this. I learned to fall in love with conflict, specifically how it was a tool that could be used to heighten ones understanding and love of characters by pushing them to extremes. The fallout after the Occupation of Bajor was also an inspiration for me with the Isles (but you can also see the colonisation of Polynesia, and ancient Greek colonies being part of that too).
- For me, First Mate Iona was inspired by all of the first officers from the 80s-90s run of Trek – the horniness of Riker, the passion of Kira, and also an attempt from me to fix the botched exoticism of Chakotay as an indigenous person myself. But other readers see different inspirations e.g. my spouse reckons Iona is more like Tuvok meets Una Chin-Riley: Tuvok being like the ‘shadow first officer’ of Voyager (at least that’s how we read him in this house), and Janeway’s ride-or-die shady AF BFF; and Una being the badass, all-round talented and no-nonsense first officer of Captain’s Pike’s Enterprise in Strange New Worlds. So really, Iona is just the quintessential first officer and I’m happy with his reading of her as much as my own.
- You can see a bunch of inspiration at more shallow levels for various other characters e.g. Iason Ambrosios is described as looking like an older version of the Emergency Medical Hologram Doctor from Voyager, and Hermia the helmswoman is in my mind a gender-flipped Harry Kim, a sort of gormless but keen and well-intentioned junior officer.
Development after the first draft:
I was honestly a little devastated to have finished Draft One because it meant I was done with my ladies for a time. I had never felt so strongly about characters before as I did about Kallista and Geni – and continue to do so! So when my spouse read it, and told me it actually ought to be a duology AT LEAST, I was actually so damn excited. And I had never ever been excited about redrafting stuff before in my entire life. But as time went on and I let the idea brew, I realised: hell yeah, this is absolutely a trilogy, starting with the original story and going to its original draft one ending. It’s just that I had to let the fuller context of books two and three find me, and split off the original draft one ending to leave for book three. But there was absolutely a journey to be had there. One where my girls could grow with the scale of the adventure, and see their relationship survive and thrive through the tests they would have to endure.
And not just that.
You see, I’d had plans for all my various romance characters to meet up one day and team up against a metaplot event. In Kallista and Geni, I had accidentally stumbled onto my flagship couple. Their stories would be the main feature from this point on. Everyone else would be a spin off. And I had so many adventures ahead of my girls in mind, after the first trilogy. They would lead the first metaplot team-up book, then they would go on to have more of their own adventures, and they would continue to lead the main gang…
But all of that is in the far future. I still have to get through the main trilogy first.
I will say this much though, about the structure of the planned spinoffs. Each of these will be covered in their own Lore Drop post in time. At the very least, I should be able to get through this phase of the series, and hopefully I will still have time, energy, and life to write the further phases. But here is the roadmap for the first phase of Kara Moon stories:
Main series book 1. A Prayer for the Pirate Queen
Prequel: Before Queens and Saints (set 10 years in the past, in first draft stage [September 2025])
Interquel: The First Mate and the Dryad’s Daughter (that’s right babyyyyy, Iona gets a book!)
Short story collection: Tales of the Paxos (to be collected from various sources over time)
Main series book 2. A Prayer for the Charybdian League
Main series book 3. A Prayer for Iunia
Second Draft:
After getting some feedback from my spouse, I embarked on the second draft in November-December 2024. This involved writing a bunch of new scenes, to meet the following goals:
- more conflict
- more actual piracy (don’t be afraid of letting my bad girls actually be bad girls, come on! It’s what the people want!)
- more detail to the various settings and creatures of power
- change up a lot of the second half, given that certain stuff from the second half of draft one was going to be in books 2 and 3 now!
- really focus on self-doubt as the problem for both Geni and Kallista
I also did a bunch of art for this version, because I was feeling so inspired. It’s pretty amateurish, but I was getting joy from it, so that was all that really mattered to me at that point. Here’s the map, including a border of chapter heading illustrations:
I passed this second version on to some trusted alpha readers and took in their opinions. A lot of it was working for them, and there were a few areas of strong group concensus around things I could be doing better. With that, I was able to move on to…
Third Draft:
I am currently (September 2025-) in the throes of planning draft number three. The structure is mostly in place now. The characters are quite correct already, just a few tweaks needed here and there. But I really need to build some new material in to really shore up Geni’s journey as a mother missing her children, to make the kids matter not just to her, but to the audience too. And there’s a number of other places which need some jigery-pokery to get it all ship-shape.
Watch this space!
Links:
My collected posting about Kallista and Geni on bluesky
More music lore:
Here are some songs from the playlist above which for me have attachments to specific scenes or characters:
Chapter 2 – the meetcute: Destination Calabria by Alex Gaudino featuring Crystal Waters
Chapter 22 – the midpoint change in direction: Total Control by The Motels
Chapter 23 – following on from the midpoint change in direction: Tonight Tonight by Smashing Pumpkins
Chapter 31-32 – oh no, it’s the All Is Lost moment…: Stand Inside Your Love by Smashing Pumpkins
Chapter 35 – (but of course not all hope is lost): Familiar Feeling by Moloko
The very final scene of the book (second half of Chapter 40) where a letter is being read: Message to my Girl by Split Enz
Any time we have a fight scene: Dance the Night Away by Dua Lipa (I know, I know, for some people it’s kinda cringe to have a Barbie movie song on here but the lyrics so perfectly get that mood for me about how she’s going to put on a perfect brave front and no one will see her heart breaking behind it!)
Songs that are for Kallista and/or Iona being swashbuckling badasses: Paper Planes by MIA and Speed Drive by Charli XCX
As always with these lore drops, feel free to ask me questions, and I may well incorporate the answers into the article. Thanks!
Kara Moon - Author of adult romantasy 