Before Krista Russell could get out the stories she wanted to tell, she had to learn to write them.

Russell, who spent many summers in Mattapoisett and now lives in Georgia, published her first novel, "Chasing the Nightbird" about the dangers and adventures of a young Cape Verdian boy in 1850s New Bedford.

“[Lucky] has grown up on a whale ship, is forced to work in a textile mill, and becomes involved in the abolitionist movement in his quest to get back to his ship,” explained Russell.

Published in 2011, Russell said it took her 10 years to finish the book.

“Because I thought it was such a great story, I kept with it even though I didn’t have the chops to tell it for a long time,” she said.

Although she studied international relations in college, writing was always something Russell wanted to do. After her kids started preschool, she enrolled in a creative writing class located four doors from her house.

“The story really came from that first class,” said Russell. With a writing mentor and other writers to help her along, she kept at her story, which she wrote for a middle school audience.

One of the best parts of the process, said Russell, was digging into historical documents.

“I like to write historical fiction because I like doing the research. I like thinking about how the characters would have acted and what they would have gone through,” she said.

The author studied first hand accounts, histories on New Bedford and the whaling industry, and photos from the Dartmouth Historical Society.

Learning about whale men, who often spent three years together, gave Russell insight into a very different world than the one that existed on shore—one where racial lines blurred.

“They all kind of have each others lives in their hand. It was more egalitarian than the world on land,” she said.

And while Russell spent a decade writing and rewriting her story about Lucky, her second novel for middle schoolers, “The Other Side of Free” is already at the publishers.

Set in 1739 in colonial Florida, Jem is a runaway slave who is rescued and ends up in a Spanish settlement. As in “Chasing the Nightbird,” Russell explores a part of U.S. that is probably unfamiliar to most.

“It was finding a story that I thought: ‘Wow, I’ve never heard of this. Why don’t I know about this?”

Russell is also working on her third novel set in Ancient Rome, and she said she has plans for more books.

Of writing, she said: “It gets easier. And there’s still a lot of stories that I want to tell.”