noise."Celestia Sleeps In--Chapter 2 notes and thanks · 1:21am Jan 29th, 2013
Chapter 2 notes:
North and South Fox Islands are real. You can find them on Wikipedia. The lighthouses are there, and the islands could be canoed to. Unfortunately, when I conceived of the location, it was mid-January, and although I could get there, I’d be an idiot to try. Thus, much of my imagery of the island is based on Google Maps (huzzah), and a blog about doing restoration work on South Fox. I know that South Fox has both gravel and sand beaches, and I assume that North Fox does as well. For the sake of the story, I am assuming that the southeast tip of the island is sand, although in reality it may not be.
I am indebted to my father for doing a fair bit of research on the Fox Islands, including consulting nautical charts to get the water depth, and find the shipping channels. He also sent me a fairly comprehensive e-mail about marine radios, including hand-held. Any of you sailors out there that find a mistake I made, I assure you, it’s not his fault, it’s mine.
I also owe another thanks to Woonsocket Wrench, for pre-reading, and to everyone on the site who reads the story, and who favorites, comments, or upvotes.
It was reading this the first time around that it had dawned on me just how far you are willing to go for the sake of accuracy -- that if it had been an option, you would have gone out to the island yourself, just to make sure everything was as factual as possible. It stayed on my mind for weeks, and sparked a number of interesting conversations among my friends and I.
It is a breath of fresh air, honestly, to see things be so accurate. However, as I hinted at in another comment, there is a place for realism, and a place for whimsy -- often dictated by the reader's preference, and as I mentioned sometime before, I usually fall a little more toward the whimsy side. Obviously, I don't mean that I don't enjoy your work, but given the choice between the two extremes (something really realistic and something really whimsical), I tend to prefer the whimsical.
I kind of lost track of my point while I was writing that.