A few pertinent things about the story and its background.

1. This was the first fully BTTF story I wrote. As anyone who has ever seen them will quickly notice, and as I've said before, this tale does not conform to the cartoons. It never did. I started writing this thing months before the 'toon first aired, and though we agreed on a few points (the Browns living in the Twentieth Century, for instance), I didn't feel like going back to change the points on which we disagreed (Doc's dialogue -- shudder! -- and Jules' personality, to name two examples). I felt the 'toons were pretty poorly done (which has gotten me in hot water with some inflexibly die-hard fans who felt I was being disloyal to the genre 'cause I didn't absolutely love 'em and throw in my support 100%), and I decided the world wouldn't fall apart if I didn't stick to what the TV show did. Coming from the world's biggest stickler for incorporating diverse and potentially contradictory details, this is a major policy change! I realize that television is a strange medium, in which the goal is often to run in place rather than let natural and normal change occur, so that the viewers will be able to see pretty much the same characters and situations from week to week. That's not the way I write; my basic philosophy is that the characters should learn something and grow a little in each new story, otherwise what's the point? So if you adored the 'toons and agree that I shouldn't have varied by one iota, stop reading now, and please don't hassle me about it. We are all entitled to our own opinions, and I firmly believe that there's room for everyone's.

2. There are no McFly ancestors in this story. Sorry.

3. The Comparative Temporal Flow Monitor (CTFM) and various holographic devices appearing in this story are additions of my own, which I first used in the cross-universe novel, The Times They Are a-Changing.

4. The character of Emily springs largely from the influence of a friend's daughter, Kathleen Weston. Other than the inspiration Katie provided, I'm not sure why Emily is here. I suppose one could attach all manner of complex psychological reasons to it, but none were intended. Here she is, and here she stays. What the hell.

5. Before anyone tells me... yes, I know this story makes use of several fallacious elements concerning the period in which it takes place. Believe me, I did my homework (as you will soon see), so I know what's what. But I felt that using these popularly-believed errors to a modest degree would make the story more appealing to a broader audience. After all, Zemeckis and Gale readily admit that the version of 1955 depicted in the original BTTF was deliberately idealized, the sort of thing people would remember through the eyes of nostalgic fondness rather than crystal clear reality. Since most folks' visions of Past Imperfect's period are heavily influenced by old swashbuckler movies and books, I thought, "Why not?" This is entertainment, after all.

6. Probably most important of all: The "Grand Pirate" mentioned throughout the book was a real person. In fact, finding him in my research provided the plot hook I needed to make this story fly from mere concept to reality.

7. This story was in no way influenced by other fan writers' works. When I wrote all but one of my BTTF stories in the early '90s, I was working in a vacuum, there being very few interested fans and only one other person I knew of who wrote in the genre (and I didn't meet her until after I'd  written most of my stuff). If you see similarities, they're nothing more than coincidences. Logical minds sometimes run in the same gutter. As C.S. Lewis once said about J.R.R. Tolkien, "Nobody influenced Tolkien. You may as well try to influence a bandersnatch." That's me.

8. I know there are a mess of little in-jokes in this story, but only two come leaping to mind: the obvious one, the bald, hawk-nosed pirate named Jean-Luc, and the inobvious one, the Rusty Scupper. That came from the name of a seafood restaurant that used to be near the Woodfield Mall outside Chicago. To me, it always seemed like a completely absurd thing to name a restaurant, so it seemed fitting to use it as the name of an equally absurd ship.

The idea for this story came from a trip we took to Milwaukee's Maritime Festival late in the summer of 1990. While touring the Tall Ships that had come into port for the festival, I had the oddest vision of a Tannen ancestor as a pirate in the Caribbean, and the rest, as they say, is history. Hope you enjoy it.

There is a rather extensive bibliography that goes with this story.  If you're interested in seeing it, just ask.