In the process of dealing with the death of Liam, one of her prematurely born twin boys, Ms Inglis found her refuge in an imaginative and "backwoods" tale she had first begun crafting four years ago.

 "The Dread Crew: Pirates of the Backwoods" was officially launched in Halifax by Nimbus Publishing on November 8.

 The novel centres around young Eric Stewart, who lives on a farm in Barss Corner and, one day, begins finding mysterious objects in the woods near his house - each marked with an unmistakable pirate sign.

 After making the discovery, Eric decides to become a pirate hunter and he soon discovers that traces of these backwoods pirates lead him to old Grampa Joe next door, who is in fact harbouring the pirates on his own property.

 "The story was born in Barss Corner during a hike through the woods," Ms Inglis said.

 "It was a slushy day in the very early spring - still snowy. We were visiting friends of ours who live in a very old farmhouse surrounded by an old woodlot, and we all went walking with our kids," she recalled.

 Ms Inglis' husband carried nine-month-old Evan, their first child, in a backpack.

 Their friends' son, Eric, also along for the journey, was about five years old at the time and was having trouble dealing with the cold conditions.

 "He began to whine about his cold hands and his wet feet with a long way to go - and so I began telling him a story about forest-roaming pirates that demolish everything in their path with a thundering wood ship," she said.

 Walking in the woods that day, I told Eric he'd better learn to hush in the woods or else. Not in an admonishing way, but as though I knew a secret," she continued.

 That made him focus, and he asked, "Why?"

 "Pirates, is what came out of my mouth," Ms Inglis said, and the story unfolded on its own. "In the telling of it, both before the twins and after, I felt like a medium. It was work to craft it and refine it and make it polished, but the characters declared themselves and how they wanted it to go.

 "I'd started writing the book almost two years before the twins were born, just picking away at it without any intentions," she recalled, "without even any awareness that I was doing anything more than just playing.

 "I hadn't told anyone that I'd been working on it. Then the twins were born and for a good year and a half, it was forgotten."

 In that 18-month span, Ms Inglis wrote about her experiences - the survival of Ben and Liam's death and everything that went with it - in her personal blog. She also founded an on-line community and collaborative blog for babylost parents called "Glow in the Woods."

 "After the initial shock wore off, I remember the book occurring to me one day and thinking, 'I'm going to have to finish that now,' with a strange kind of definitiveness that I hadn't felt before," she explained.

 "It represented an escape from so much writing about loss and recovery, but more than that, it was refreshing just to have a goal. Something epic and silly and fantastical," Ms Inglis added.

 Deciding to get back to telling the story gave her new energy.

 "I didn't dare presume that it would ever be published, and so I didn't have any grand scheme," she said. "I just wanted to do right by what I'd started. I wasn't worried about the marketability of what I was creating. It never felt like a chore and there was never any pressure. Every page was a joy."

 Ms Inglis, herself, didn't grow up here in Lunenburg County, but eventually settled in Chester Basin after starting out in Halifax and living in different parts of the country, including Vancouver and Whitehorse.

 After more than a decade in Vancouver, she and her husband, Justin, decided to move home to the Maritimes prior to the birth of their first child.

 "My parents moved to Hubbards during my university years. So I didn't grow up in Lunenburg County, but as we drove across the border at Amherst, we headed for the South Shore: for grandparently help, for affordability until Justin was hired as a firefighter in Halifax," she said.

 "We adopted a sailboat - or, rather, a sailboat adopted us - and so we decided to stay. We bought our first house in Chester Basin and now we can't imagine being anywhere else."

 And, Ms Inglis said, given how much inspiration can be found here, it should come as no surprise that so much about Lunenburg County's inland wove its way into the book.

 "The pirate hunter in the book is named Eric Stewart, after Eric and his little brother. The family's house was the basis for the book - Eric's house - with the very same goats and peacocks the family keeps," Ms Inglis added.

 "The riotous forest all around, the old tractor, the kitchen and its giant wood oven, the barn - it was so vivid, the day the story came to me, so informed by those woods and the people who live there," she said. "It had to be told in that way, in that place."

 For more information about Ms Inglis and "The Dread Crew: Pirates of the Backwoods," please visit http://kateinglis.com or http://dreadcrew.com.