imagining the mermaid castle, part 1
world-building diaries
the mermaid castle is the name of a website-world I’m creating for my inner child. it’ll serve as a digital memory palace to hold the blurry fragments of my childhood — and to evoke the spirit of my inner child, in real time.
(actually, since time works differently on the internet, the mermaid castle will be a collision of past, present, and future).
it’s an artistic web project, an experimental writing project, a visual / illustration / animation project, and a very very personal, emotional-psychological project: where I’ll have the infinite space of a digital vessel to examine the objects, artifacts, memories, and stories I tell myself about the mysterious space which is childhood.
of course, it’ll ultimately be part truth and part fiction — as all childhood memories are.
how this idea began
while recreating my seven day world-building course, house on the webs, I was brainstorming potential websites to build as a tutorial / examples for the lessons of the course. I had two immediate ideas: build a world for my inner child, or a world for my dog (this will definitely happen, in the next few months…) I decided on my inner child.
then, in completing my own assignments from Day 1, 2, and 3 — what started out as an instructional mockup world… became something with soul, substance, and spirit to it. it was calling to me to create it, for real.
I’ve designed my course to be a narrative excavation — a slow unpeeling of the heart of the story — that is, I’m framing a website as a story; a book that’s constantly unfolding and being written, its pages shuffling and reshuffling.
my day 1 exercise and assignment is to map out the narrative elements of who / what / when / where / how / why. here’s my brainstorming map below.
where the name came from
I didn’t stumble upon the name the mermaid castle until Day 3 of the course. it comes from a few places —
when I was a child, I was obsessed with fairytales. one of my most prized possessions when I immigrated from China was a white-bound book of fairytales — exquisitely illustrated in tiny square frames. there was no text (at least, not in my recollection).
when I moved to the US, I entered the world of Disney — the stories of princesses seemed more real to me than real life itself. maybe it was my way of escaping from a new reality / country / world that didn’t make sense to me — by losing myself into the mythical, magical fantasy worlds of evil stepmothers, potions, dragons, and princes. my parents bought me VHS tapes — one at a time — and I’d watch each classic Disney movie over and over and over again.
one of my favorite stories was The Little Mermaid. I had an alarm clock on my nightstand table of Disney Ariel on a glow-in-the-dark rock. it would wake me up in the morning with “Under the Sea” in beeping sounds. it was one of my favorite things I owned.
the mermaid castle is a safe place
the mermaid castle is the home that my inner child dreamed of — to protect her from the confusions of life. things have meaning there. things make sense. especially the things that don’t make sense are retold in a way that make sense to a child.
it’s a semi-truthful, semi-fictional narrative world / construct that I’m creating to be an imaginative creative vessel for old and buried memories, like underwater polaroids, so that I can examine them more closely, and hold them up to the light.
at first, I thought that this name was very cheesy, but the more that I lingered with it, the more it felt right. my inner child thinks of herself as a mermaid, and she’s always alive and present, within me.
and, after many years of iteration, the current homepage of my website world for adult me — is oceanic themed. I laughed when I realized that. it seems as though I’ve never left the deep.
💌 I write a weekly newsletter on creative alchemy called guide.notes. find me also on my podcast: botanical studies of internet magic.