thanate | Word for the day:

"enislement" (which I surmise to mean the making of something into an island, although unsurprisingly my dictionary is completely mystified by it)

Some quite long time ago (elementary school, though I'm not certain when) I read a book by Laurence Yep where the narrator was a dragon-- I totally forget the title, and I think there were several sequels which I didn't read, but the point is that there was an inland sea (which had dried up... there was some plot stuff about salt flats) that I misread as being an "island sea." And the connotations of that, even once I sorted out my mistake, continue to fascinate me. It's not too different, really-- land surrounded by water, or water surrounded by land, a pocket of ocean tucked into the middle of a continent, isolating the sea creatures the same way the galapogos wildlife is cut off from other land.

This miscellaneous thought brought to through the joint agency of John Fowles and

grauwulf.