Michael returned from Chinatown yesterday with two large bags of dark cherries. I’m planning to dip at least some of them in chocolate later, for me. He can and will eat pounds and pounds of them plain.

I’m on a roll with chapters of my novel, which has led to reflections on world-building.

Every writer is to some extent a world-builder. You create a fictional character and the world around him or her must be logical and believable. That can be harder than you think, even when the story is set in our reality.

When you are creating an imaginary world, whether it’s an imagined city, or country, or planet, it can be even more challenging. In the course of writing this WIP, I have had to research, among other things, late 19th century history, the economy of cotton and sugar cane production in postbellum America, the history of restaurants, and the raw materials likely to be available in the Caribbean of the 1870s, ’80s, and ’90s.

All of this so that the physical description of my island and the lives of my characters will be logical to those readers who have some knowledge of these subjects. For a character’s story to be believable, the context must be believable.

I think I’ve achieved that. I have no doubt that my finished novel will contain some technical mistakes, but I don’t think they are so blatant they’ll knock out the eye of a moderately knowledgeable reader. When I go to my island, the shade that falls on me from trees and buildings looks and feels right. I can smell the dusty shell-gravel used on its paths, the wet rope, fried shellfish and rancid fish that scent the long, busy pier they had to build because of their shallow harbor. I can hear the accents of the islanders, the mixture of English, Spanish and French that they speak, the squawks of the parrots native there, the constant beat of the ocean. I know what it looks and feels like in the morning, and at sunset. I know what my characters hear at night in their beds as they drift off to sleep. I know how magic works on the island, what expressions Islanders use, who is on top there, and who is on the bottom.

No wonder my writing is going so well. It enables me to leave this apartment. My book is now a place to me.

To write about Touperdu Isle is not just to set words on paper, but to walk there. I can only hope that will also apply to reading about it.