We know ye’ve been dying to know who we are…so here’s a bit of history of this surly, crazy mess of pirates.

Chance, aka Maureen, bides her time along the Monterey Bay of California, looting and pillaging with great regularity every Starbucks in sight. Totally mad, she is well known for dressing up in twenty pounds of pirate garb and then strolling about the yearly Northern California Renaissance Faire, the Pirate Festival in Vallejo, and making the occasional foray to the southland for the Ojai Pirate Faire. And very rarely she travels the road past the frozen volcanoes of the Cascades to the northern woods of Oregon for the Portland Pirate Festival. She has a thing for pirates. At last estimation, she has written 2.9 million words in her never-ending pirate saga. Which she hopes to see published someday. Yes, she is mad. Chance crawled aboard the Revenge and wanting to make herself useful, began tending bar. You can examine her diploma from the Tortuga School of Bartending, on display behind the bar. Where each drink begins with rum, ends with rum and has rum in the middle. 2nd Chance can be spotted on any given day at her local Starbucks, listening to songs of the sea, surfing the net and tapping away, madly, on her laptop. Writing about pirates.

Christie (commonly known as Sin, Quartermaster, or QC) is the bravest and baddest of the pirate crew. Notoriously known to love fondling large guns and spider-monkeying dark and very dangerous men, she is frequently found outsmarting her husband and plotting her next move to get ice cream in the house while he is on his weight-lifting diet. (The fact the monkey is named after him is purely coincidence.) She prefers to write light-hearted books that mirror her life, featuring guns, murders, computer hacking, and twisted plots that even Mark Twain wouldn’t believe—and is currently working on her romantic suspense series with these light-hearted themes and dark, dangerous men at their center. (Hey, write what you know, right?) She would be continuing her Super-Secret-Agent/Witness-Relocation life now, except that she met Hellion, and hasn’t been allowed to hide in obscurity any longer. (She currently resides in an undisclosedly located, booby-trapped bunker, which Hellion always manages to find and infiltrate regardless.)

Donna is our newest pirate. She is a connoisseur of many careers, including attorney, winery tasting room manager, and retail business owner.  Each one has contributed a rich amount of inspiration to her favorite job title — “writer”. She writes humorous contemporary romance and Regency historical romances, and is also working on a paranormal romance. She currently resides in Massachusetts, where she wonders why all the Revolutionary War re-enactments take place so early in the morning; and she is single-handedly doing her part to support the local Starbucks. She spends free time reading, laughing with friends, avoiding housework, and auditioning leading men for the movie versions of her books.

Fran (a.k.a. “Captain Hellion”, Hellion, Sophie Sinclair, or whatever non-antiquated name she’s adopted this week) is madly at work on her WIP, which answers the age-old question: if Adam & Eve failed marriage counseling and had to find their soulmates in Las Vegas, would they manage to keep their hands off each other long enough to accomplish it? And then there’s Lucifer. Fran grew up (and still lives) in the Midwest; and received her BA in English from Columbia College. Fran currently uses her degree to make folders and edit local menus at places she eats. Her one true love is Captain Jack Sparrow, whom she hopes never to be parted from. She can be bribed with cheese dip; and has a tendency to strip when she’s had too much rum.

Haleigh–or Hal as we call her around here–is slowly attempting to get her first novel published, and writing another. (Yes, she’s our resident workaholic.) As our resident Coxswain (say that with me a few times: Cox-Swain), her days are filled with classes on genre writing, teaching conflict resolution to college students who have less of an attention span than our undead monkey, and perfecting her pole dancing skills. (She attempted to show us a few simple tricks, but after the Captain nearly knocked herself into a coma, trying to re-enact ‘flying angel’, everyone thought it was best if Hal was our resident pole dancer and we just watched.) She lives near the beach in Maryland with the hubby and a overly-energetic pit bull.

Lisa (“Powder Monkey”) lives in a small town in southern Ohio with her husband and 8 year old son. She works as a nurse in the operating room, and until three years ago had no aspirations of writing a novel. She has a wicked sense of humor, and loves playing with her hot alpha males in her latest WIP. She writes romantic suspense, and enjoys reading historical novels. When she’s not stroking big cannons or fiddling with balls, she spends her down time chatting it up with her blog partners and a group of ladies who share a love for Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series.

Marnee (“Gunner”) just completed her second manuscript, a dark paranormal romance about a prophet whose premonitions start a demon rebellion she’s hell-bent to stop.  She grew up in Western Pennsylvania and attended Dickinson College, receiving a degree in English literature. Continuing on her way east, she settled in South New Jersey where she worked in the mortgage industry and taught high school English. She is married and currently stays at home with her feisty two year old and two resultantly beleaguered cats. (You guessed it: we kidnapped her to be our sober chauffuer. We never drink and sail. Plus Marnee is insanely funny. It was because of the chicken salad.)

Terrio (Boatswain or Terri Osburn) used to have a nice, simple life. Now not so much. Born in the Ohio Valley, she has an Associate Degree in the Music/Video Business (yes, that’s a real degree) from The Art Institute of Pittsburgh (yes, that’s a real school) and in the Spring of 2009 will complete her Bachelors in Business Management with Strayer University. After eight years on the radio as a country music disc jockey, she left the music biz behind to return to the cubicle jungle. By day she’s an Administrative Assistant, but her nights are filled with college courses and writing contemporary as well as erotic romance. Terrio is a single mom living near the beach in Virginia with her 8 year old daughter, Isabelle, and their crazy, cat-nip sniffing cat, Bumblebee.

Santa is a Contemporary Romance writer with one completed manuscript under her belt and another in the works.  When not wearing her writer’s tiara, you can find her wearing her deli-diva tiara helping run the family gourmet food store and keeping her deli thugs in line.  The rest of her time is spent behind the wheel chauffeuring her kiddos to and from various activities.  An ardent foodie, Santa writes about heroines who turn up the heat in the kitchen and practice more than the culinary arts with the heroes in their lives.  Lucky for us, she also serves as the Galley ‘Ho of the ship and that’s good because with all the rum disappearing around here, we need some food to balance things out.