The Disorientation of Sailing and Storytelling

I learned something profound on the water, and it didn’t come from the sails, the rigging, or the compass—it came from the absence of boundaries.

Sailing without markers is like wandering into a void. The shoreline disappears, the horizon becomes everything, and suddenly the mind loses its bearings. What you thought you knew collapses into uncertainty. It’s a lesson not just about boats and tides but also about life, relationships, and the dark corners of the human mind that I explore in SEETHINGS II.

The Vanishing of Certainty

On land, we’re comforted by signposts, trees, houses, roads—constant affirmations of our position. We know who we are because we know where we stand. But take away those markers, and we’re exposed. At sea, a sailor learns quickly that confidence can evaporate in moments. You glance around, expecting to anchor yourself to a familiar reference, but nothing’s there—only waves that rise and fall, reshaping the world every few seconds. It’s easy to feel lost, even when you’re not.

This sense of disorientation is both frightening and liberating. It strips you of illusion. On the water, without fixed points, you confront yourself. You either adapt or panic. There is no middle ground.

That same principle applies to storytelling. Characters adrift without moral or emotional landmarks are forced to navigate using instinct. In SEETHINGS II, this theme is central. When people lose the comforts of certainty—whether in marriage, morality, or truth—they reveal who they really are.

The Compass and the Mind

A compass should guide you, but here’s the twist: even with a compass, you can lose yourself. A tool is only as good as the person who trusts it. On my early sails, I’d set my direction, confident in its precision, only to find that currents and winds had quietly undone my intentions. The compass said one thing, but the reality of water, weather, and human error told another.

In fiction, our inner compasses are much the same. We tell ourselves we’re good people, moral people, safe people. We think we’re navigating toward happiness, fidelity, or civility. But underneath, there are currents—instincts, resentments, buried desires—that pull us elsewhere. You don’t always realise how far off course you’ve drifted until land is no longer where you expected it to be.

That’s what disorientation does: it sneaks up. It’s not a sudden storm. It’s the slow erosion of reference points until your entire perspective is compromised.

Marriage Without Landmarks

Now take that same idea and apply it to intimacy. A marriage has landmarks too: anniversaries, shared routines, and familiar rituals in bed or around the home. When those vanish—or worse, when they’re ignored—partners can drift without realising how lost they’ve become. In SEETHINGS II, I explore this exact phenomenon: two people navigating their union without agreed markers, adrift in silence.

The danger isn’t in one monumental event, but in the erosion of signposts. One day you’re having sex, the next you’re not, and then you can’t remember the last time it happened. A thousand small silences replace a thousand small truths. Soon, like a sailor without a shore, you’re left with only empty horizons. That’s where the disorientation takes hold.

And in disorientation, people either cling tighter or they look elsewhere. Some choose to find a new compass—a lover, a secret, a hidden fantasy. Others let themselves be swallowed by the waves of routine, suffocating in it. In my novel, I asked: What happens when someone uses disorientation not as a burden, but as an opportunity? When does someone thrive in that void?

The Killer’s Horizon

For the predator in SEETHINGS II, disorientation isn’t a nightmare. It’s paradise. Just as an experienced sailor can read subtle shifts in wind and tide, the villain thrives in the spaces where others feel most lost. He doesn’t need landmarks; he knows how to navigate without them. That makes him terrifying, because he belongs to a world most of us can’t survive in.

The killer doesn’t see a featureless ocean as disorienting—he sees it as freedom. Every wave hides him. Every absence of signposts blinds his victims. Normal people flounder; he flourishes. This inversion is what makes him powerful, and it’s what makes the reader squirm. We expect disorientation to cripple, but for some, it’s the only place they feel at home.

Photography and the Frame

Photography has a similar disorienting quality when you strip away landmarks. A frame is supposed to clarify, but it also distorts. Take a photo of a stormy sea with no horizon, and suddenly the viewer can’t tell up from down. Remove the landmarks, and perspective vanishes. The same thing happens in storytelling: remove clear moral boundaries, and the reader feels unsettled, unable to orient themselves.

That was deliberate in my writing. Just as I’ve stared through a camera lens and seen the world stripped of anchors, I’ve asked readers to confront narratives where they can’t lean on clichés or predictable villain tropes. They’re left to navigate in the dark, with only instinct to guide them.

The Ocean’s Voice

The sea has its own language, and sailors who don’t listen are punished. It whispers first—subtle changes in wind, shifts in wave height, the smell of salt carried differently in the air. If you ignore those whispers, it screams with storms. Disorientation often begins quietly, imperceptibly, until it becomes catastrophic.

I see marriages and psyches much the same way. Silence begins as a whisper: a conversation avoided, a truth unspoken, a desire withheld. Ignore those whispers, and one day they’ll roar. The storm will come, and you’ll be too far from shore to find your way back. That inevitability is something the characters in SEETHINGS II live with, some embracing it, others perishing in it.

Why Disorientation Matters in Storytelling

Readers crave anchors. They want villains with tragic backstories, heroes with noble compasses, and marriages that can be repaired. But what if you take those away? What if you write a story with no moral shoreline, no tidy compass bearing? That’s disorientation in literature, and it can be as powerful as any storm at sea.

By removing landmarks, I ask readers to sit with their discomfort. It’s the same discomfort a sailor feels when the horizon dissolves into endless water. It forces the reader to lean inward, to question their instincts, to wonder if their compass still points true. In that space, unease grows. And unease is fertile ground for psychological thrillers.

Lessons from the Sea

Over the years, sailing taught me:

• Landmarks are comforts, not guarantees.
• Disorientation is inevitable when you step into vastness.
• Currents beneath the surface matter more than winds above it.
• Confidence without awareness is delusion.
• Sometimes, to survive, you must surrender to forces greater than yourself.

These are also the lessons of SEETHINGS II. The novel is less about a killer and more about what happens when ordinary people lose their landmarks—when marriage dissolves, when intimacy vanishes, when morality is stripped bare. What’s left is instinct, raw and unfiltered. And instinct is rarely noble.

Home Port

To sail without landmarks is to accept vulnerability. To live in a marriage without agreed boundaries is to accept disorientation. To write or read a thriller without clichés is to surrender to uncertainty. In each, there is fear—but also truth.

SEETHINGS II is my exploration of that space: the void between what we think we know and what actually is. Just as the sailor learns to navigate without markers, my characters—and my readers—are asked to confront a world where disorientation isn’t failure. It’s the point.

And when you finally accept that, you might just find you’ve been sailing blind your whole life, never realising how little control you had at all.

–Michael (Dark fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)