Working Title - Nereides

The idea for the story was a combination of too many hours playing Subnautica BZ and listening to a podcast about fairy tales. There was a story about a Nereid that was captured by a boat crew and forced into human form, but when she breaks free she turns back into her true self and escapes back into the ocean.

Like some of my stories, this one started as a dream of a single scene. There was despair and diving into the ocean, but instead of drowning, there was change, confusion, and wonder.

So the trick for this is how to build a world that gets to, and passes through that scene. Hence Marcus Townsend, resident and constable on the water planet of Aegeus came into being. Orphaned at the age of twelve when the McLane colony was destroyed, he's made a life of sorts in one of the other colonies that took in those known contemptuously as "McLane Orphans".

My second POV character is Dana Reynolds. She's heir to ReyCorp, one of the largest corporations on Aegeus. She lives alone in a complex built as a proof of concept by ReyCorp on the edges of their contracted waters, acting as a intermediary between humans and the existing natives of Aegeus, called nereides.

The fun thing about writing a story set on a water world is learning about water. Constructing buildings in water. Pressure on the human body. What do things look like at depth? Where do you lose light? And then there are storms on a planet with no land to slow them down. How deep do you need to build so that you aren't getting your colonies torn apart. And how would people react and live in enclosed environments? What would that society look like? All these questions, and more, came up as I started out.

I also wrote the bulk of this in 2020, during covid. Watching a pandemic play out in real time was so much different than what was portrayed in movies and TV. Because you always need to throw more things at your protagonist, and I wanted to show what response to a pandemic was really like, I tossed one into the story. Which was a whole other rabbit hole of virology, vaccines, and vectors. There isn't a lone brilliant scientist that saves the day, it's thousands of researchers slogging through data and testing, building on what was done before. Now, how to make that an interesting narrative was a fun exercise.

Current Status

This one is written, beginning to end and out to test readers. I need to make another editing pass before it goes live. With the current environment around AI, I'm taking my time.

🔖Tags:draft water worldbuilding Writing