As any full-time glasses wearer knows, seeing underwater is only a thing if you can keep prescription swim goggles from fogging up.
This is not my strong suit, so I have a long history of being that dork in the swimming pool still wearing her glasses.
… There was more to this post, and some people have commented on it, but for some reason the internet has decided to eat it. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote before, but the upshot is that I’ve been driving along the Great Highway in San Francisco a lot lately and it has crept into my WIP novel.
I’m a nervous driver. On long, stressful drives through the city I’ve gotten in the habit of visualizing it underwater. Tall clumps of kelp forrest instead of the tall trees between the road and the ocean along some sections of the coast, like in that several-story viewing window at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Slow, syrupy currents instead of brisk winds. And maybe part of all this is that I’ve always wished I could see clearly underwater, but between either chlorine or salt and my poor vision that’s difficult to achieve.
So in my novel, where the sea level has risen quite a bit, the characters are going to visit a submerged San Francisco.
at Milliways with a pen 
I think the parts of ourselves we leak into our writing are some of the best! Because we can draw from experience to help the reader feel what we felt, see what we saw, heard what we heard, etc…
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I agree, “write what you know” works really well here. And it’s really interesting when something you didn’t quite realize about yourself leaks in and hey, you’ve learned something new by writing fiction.
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San Francisco as an ancient underwater city sounds fascinating! Nice post.
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Thanks! The more I think about it, the more I kind of want to find a landscape artist to commission for some concept art.
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That sounds like a great idea. You might want to check with the art department of a local college or university to get their recommendation for what it is you would like to do. Good luck!
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Intrigued by your underwater San Fransisco. Bits and pieces of me always end up in my stories, my challenge is to know when to stop and what needs to be taken out.
Josefine from
Getting to the end
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Same here. If I get too attached to certain things because I know they’re things I’m pulling from my life, it can be hard to see that maybe they should be cut from the story.
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Snorkeling the Golden Gate… interesting. I grew up in the Caribbean so swimming underwater is a breeze, without or without a mask! However, looking down into deep water where I can’t see the bottom is a bit unnerving.
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Yeeeeah if I can’t put my feet down I’m probably not going in it. I’ve gone snorkeling in Hawaii a few times and that’s pretty deep, but I make sure I’m well provided with flotation devices and I don’t go out far enough where it gets dark-blue deep. My worst fear would be to look down and see something rising up under me.
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