Dear Readers,

In our first blog posting, we spoke a little about what we’re doing and intending, but now we want to add to that a little more about our first projects. As we said in our first, we are joint-explorers of adventure fiction, writing about exploration in a parallel 18th-century world. To heroes drawn from the French and English navies of the period, we have heroines whom we’ve created from elements of fantasy and South Pacific culture, with our goal the addition of more fierce and able women to the world  of fantasy/adventure fiction.  The books are in English, of course, but include names based upon Polynesian models for heroines and the world around them, and upon the languages of the far north for their opponents, the strange, silent Atuk and their god, Haleiheia Teiheifata, “he who drinks breath, is twisted in cold” (as their enemies call him).

To create this new parallel, our work combines research into the actual (well, one actual) 18th-century and its ideas about the ocean to the west of South America and about what they believed to be a continent-of-balance far to the south (Antarctica in our world, in fact). We have also had to teach ourselves as much as we needed about the complex world of 18th-century naval technology, as well as about the history of Polynesian culture and colonization of the Pacific. In coming blogs, we’ll discuss that research and provide some bibliography and links for anyone who would like to follow us–and we hope that there will be many. 

And, because we enjoy mystery along with collaboration, we have decided to emulate some of our literary ancestors, like the early Brontes and Louisa May Alcott and even Boz, and publish our work under a joint pen name, CD.  Perhaps we’ll offer a prize for anyone who can guess why we chose those initials…