Goodreads asked Stephen J. Alexander:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Stephen J. Alexander I really don't know...I wanted to write something romantic. I'm a French and British passport holder and I lived for a long time in Spain. So, I didn't want to use either Barcelona or Paris as my book's setting. Romantic they both are in modern folklore. But, I know both too well. I wanted something that was still exotic to me. I visited and chose to set my story in a fashionable district of Milan. Characters' names all have significance and pay homage to various friends of mine throughout my life. That's pretty much every one of them in fact, except for the heroine, Alice. I love Lewis Carroll's Alice. It's a homage to her. Both the male and female leads have quirks and demons that I share with them. The best friend of my leading man who has passed away too young, is based upon a cross between my best friend who passed away too young in 2009 and River Phoenix who was a damned genius stolen from us all way too early! There is a name-link between the character Peter Allan Ferris and the kid in my children's book, Peter & the Dwarf Planets (Olympia Pub. 2018). I named them specifically after my best friend, Pete.

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