WHAT IS THE RESILIENCE?

So, let’s start from the beginning. (If you accidentally landed here, you may want to take the door down to the left to the start of the tour.)

The Resilience is an imaginary, yet very real, pirate ship. I know this may be confusing, but it makes perfect sense to me. But then again, I built her.

I’m a writer, you know, and this is what we do. We make shit up. We create worlds, people, belief systems, and other weird and wonderful things that no one’s ever heard of. Well, at least not quite the way we wrote them. They all become very real to us. And, if we’re lucky, they become real to our readers too.

The Resilience may not exist in a book yet, but she’s still every bit as real as the Dawn Treader, the Black Pearl, Red October, Vingilot or, indeed, the greatest ship ever built: Skíðblaðnir herself.

If none of that helped explain the existence of me ole ship, maybe our Quartermaster can do a better job of it. He normally does. When I asked him why people are struggling to understand it, he said:

“You have to use your imagination to grok the metaphor, which makes [the Resilience] imaginary. I think they’re equating imaginary with not real, which is how it is usually used. But strictly speaking, an object of imagination is real once it exists in the mind. It is both real and imaginary, which takes us into Platonic ideals of reality.”

See? Easy peasy…

Now, why would a supposedly sane person build an imaginary pirate ship? Good question. The short answer is that after more than 35 years of blogging on a number of free sites and portals, I was looking for a way to bring it all back home. I wanted a place where I could put my work on display on walls I actually owned. 

Once I’d pulled it all together, however, I realised I had written way too much, and way too diverse, for it all to fit on a single wall. But a ship has plenty of walls, decks and cabins, and I realised I could turn the Resilience into a kind of exhibition centre. The exhibition of my life, if you will.

Today, she hosts a series of independent blogs and websites, including this one. She also offers me, and a steadily growing number of writers and inde authors, a home, and a treasure trove of shared resources, knowledge and experience.

As Captain, I am ultimately responsible for the ship and anything that goes on here whether we’re at sea, moored by a river bank or safely back on our home turf in Libertalia. But none of it would be possible without the tremendous trio working with me on Quarterdeck.

If you go through the door to the right down below, we’ll take a look at Quarterdeck next…