Inspiration for the Story: Allie’s Return

So, as I’ve stated before, I had intended for Oceania: The Underwater Series to be a standalone novel. However, after being pestered by a few of my beta readers for a sequel, my mind began to think about what else could happen in the underwater city. After a while, I realized I didn’t want to leave the high-tech green city so soon either. As I thought about it, I really didn’t get to explore the society of Oceania. Through the first novel, you get to “see” what the city looks like, but not how the city functions from a social standpoint. I began to wonder, what would happen if Allie had to live there for a time? Not visit, but actually become part of the society? How would a society that values education above all else run? Would there be other departments or sectors of the city that didn’t revolve around science? In Allie’s Return, all of these questions become answered.

As usual, I will keep spoilers to a minimum, but if you haven’t read Oceania: The Underwater City or Allie’s Return yet, I suggest you do that before reading any further.

For Allie to return and live in Oceania, I needed a good reason for it. It had to be something that could keep her there for a long time and force the Oceanians to allow her into their society. So, as I kept thinking about it, I began to ask the question, “What if there was another Great Plague?” And that was it. My thoughts started to explode with so many plot ideas, I couldn’t help but start writing them.

As before with Oceania, I wanted Allie’s Return to feature a lot about the marine environment, especially the deep ocean. I wanted to inspire a desire to learn more about the ocean from my readers and about the rare creatures who dwell there. In Allie’s Return, you’ll find adventures in the photic zone to the aphotic zone, the mesopelagic to the bathypelagic. Once again, I highlighted animals that some people may not know about or know a lot about. I included a rare species of anglerfish, binocular fish, salmon sharks, and more. Some creatures are so rare that I struggled to find reliable information on them (seeing as I don’t have any subscriptions to academic journals). So just like for Oceania, I’ll be highlighting each animal in Allie’s Return in the next blog post, which will be in a month. If I decide to release two different blog posts on the sea creatures in the novel like I did for Oceania, then you’ll get lucky and I’ll post two blog posts next month instead of one!

You’ve reached the end of the blog post for this week. Stay tuned (or subscribe to the blog) to be notified of next month’s post. I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post and if you have any comments, you can leave them here on my blog or email me directly at elizataye@gmail.com. As always, I love hearing from my readers.