ALICE FILES #1
More than any other writer, the project was spiritually guided by Robert Louis Stevenson, and at times I felt like the landscape of the novel was not a recreation of the actual South Pacific but the landscape of *his* South Pacific. He ended his life in the Pacific as an expat, and worked to translate western works and even write original fiction in Polynesian languages, for the locals. As these weren't written cultures, it was invaluable to have a keen-eyed writer describing these locales in a way that felt honest (unlike Melville's South Seas writings, which will be covered in another edition). Numerous details (and even spellings, to the chagrin of my copyeditor) were stolen from Stevenson's South Seas writings, and also included here is a great biography of him by Claire Harman which I read, as I started feeling very close to him as I worked in his shadow.