An Invisible Tide: Story Background

An Invisible Tide came out last week and I was a little delayed in getting around to writing up the some background from my preliminary notes. However, without further ado, here we go:

Publishing Details

An Invisible Tide is a short story hosted by The Future Fire [External Link] as part of issue 32 (direct link here: [External Link]). It came out in March 2015.

Inspiration

There are three strands of inspiration that eventually wove themselves into a story – although it took a few attempts at putting them together – amost as if I tried every conceivaable method of putting several threads together (knitting, crochet, plaiting, etc) with much swearing and unpicking to get things right.

The first inspiration that stuck in my head as a Good Thing for a story was a talk I attended as part of the Clarke Award festivities [External Link] way back in 2013. This was called #WTF2013 (or Write The Future 2013) and involved a few science talks – you can find some information here on the old ticket page: [External Link]. The thing that particularly stuck with me was part of the acidification of the oceans talk and it was about algal blooms (such as the “Red Tide”) that come from too many nutrients escaping from our industrial use of land and rivers into the oceans. These algal blooms can be dangerous in that they use up the oxygen in the water – and sometimes affect the balance of gas above them. However, they tend not to last year round and… At which point my brain went “Ah!” and filed that away for later. So, the Invisible Tide mentioned in the title? It’s an algal bloom.

My second inspiration has also come up in Good Form, which The Future Fire also picked up. Some of the background for that story went up as a blog post on The Future Fire blog here: [External Link]. That post looks at how the self can differ from both the individual’s perception of themselves and from other people’s perception of the individual, and that line of thinking came up again for An Invisible Tide. Where Good Form explores the difference between lovers’ (or those who have a potential to be lovers) perceptions and images, An Invisible Tide is more broad and looks at a parent-child relationship, a friendship and a marriage.

The final thread of inspiration is another one that carries over from Good Form. The premise for Good Form is that celebrities can licence their public image (both appearance and character) such that they can be used as the basis for what is basically a mobile mannequin. Part of the inciting idea for An Invisible Tide is another look at this public image issue but from a slightly different angle, looking at the pressure to perform as expected rather than as one might wish to or truly are. In fact, while I had intended to put in a “public image” point of view much of that part didn’t work with how things eventually went together. However, my choice of celebrity in this instance was a sports person, so the idea of the pressure to make life decisions before the person is perhaps ready to set themselves on a particular path remains in the resulting story. Alongside that, there is also the person who doesn’t make it, who wasn’t quite good enough to be pushed into making the same decisions.

Spoiler Notice

Just in case anyone wants to actually talk about An Invisible Tide, it’s best not to read any comments below unless you’re prepared to read any spoilers.

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