Halidom Origins

Working-Class Roots

Kodak Park and a Union Family

Halidom’s working-class texture comes from growing up near Kodak Park and in a family connected to skilled trades and union labor.

My father belonged to Local 13, Plumbers and Steamfitters. That world shaped how I saw work, machinery, and infrastructure, especially the people who understand complex systems well enough to keep them running.

You can feel that influence throughout Halidom. Its workers maintain equipment, repair what breaks, salvage what others discard, and often understand the city better than the people in charge of it. That helped me build one of the story's central contrasts: the people who keep a system running are rarely the same people who benefit from it most.

Engineering Nature

Perfect Crops?

Halidom was also influenced by real efforts to engineer perfect crops for higher yields, pest resistance, longer shelf life, and other desirable traits. Sounds great: change a seed to solve a problem. But who decides what perfect means? What happens when the engineered solution begins disrupting everything around it?

Kudzu

Kudzu was one of the main visual influences behind the Bloom. When I first moved down to North Carolina, I saw it covering everything. Houses and trees hidden underneath a living carpet. Kudzu is invasive and nearly impossible to stop, and there is something weirdly alien about it.

In Halidom, the vine is much larger, more aggressive, way more dangerous. But both carry the same unsettling idea: nature reclaiming the structures people assumed belonged to them.

Cloud Seeding

Cloud seeding also fed into the creation of Halidom: the real-world attempt to encourage precipitation by introducing particles into clouds. Weather is one of the least predictable forces in nature, and yet we still try to control it. Halidom built its survival around a daily rain cycle. Of course, control creates dependency. Once an artificial process becomes part of the infrastructure, people build their lives around the assumption that it will keep working.

Genetically Modified Insects

I’m not a fan of altering an insect’s DNA to solve a human problem. Genetically modified insects are being developed in an attempt to reduce disease by interfering with their reproduction. But living things do not always respect the boundaries set in a lab.

The science is very different from what happens in Halidom, but the basic idea tracks. The Rootbane beetles were engineered for one purpose: to consume the Bloom and stop its spread. Once they eat all the Bloom, they need something else to feed on.

Systems, Memory, and Technology

Knot Theory

Knots have interested me since my brothers and I learned to tie a Trilene fishing knot at Black Lake, New York. If a bass pulled the hook off your line, you never heard the end of it. These days, we mostly joke that we used to be able to tie one without putting on our glasses.

A knot solves a physical problem. It can secure a fishing hook or join two ropes. But it also preserves knowledge. The sequence matters. The shape matters. If someone knows how to read the knot, they can reproduce the process.

Old Telecom Infrastructure

Whisper Nodes came partly from years of thinking about old infrastructure that most people never notice. Networks depend on equipment hidden in closets, mounted on poles, buried underground, or hiding in plain sight. Some of it remains long after the original network has been replaced or forgotten.

That led me to wonder what would happen if pieces of an old communications system survived longer than the people who understood it. In Halidom, those remnants became the Whisper Nodes: dormant devices that harvest tiny amounts of energy and communicate through an old distributed lattice. The network is still there. Almost no one remembers what it was built to do.

Modern Society

Political Division

Halidom was also influenced by seeing politics divide people who often have far more in common than they realize.

Once people sort themselves into opposing camps, labels and loyalties begin to matter more than ordinary shared concerns. Family. Work. Fear. Hope. Responsibility. Grief. The desire to build a decent life. That divide became part of Halidom’s social structure. Its institutions and inherited histories have taught people to see one another as members of opposing groups before seeing them as individuals.

The story is not built around any one modern political ideology. It is about the older human habit of dividing into factions, then forgetting how much people on both sides still share.

Storytelling Influences

Moral Themes Without Preaching

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien both influenced the way I think about moral and spiritual themes in fiction.

Their stories carry ideas rooted in Christianity without stopping every few pages to explain the theology. The meaning comes through the choices characters make: sacrifice, mercy, courage, temptation, forgiveness, loyalty, humility, and the struggle between selfishness and service.

I wanted Halidom to work the same way. Goodness matters. People have a responsibility to care for one another. Hope is still worth choosing when the world gives you plenty of reasons to abandon it.

Those themes needed to come through character, consequence, and choice.

Life Finds a Way

Michael Crichton was another major influence, especially his recurring warning that life resists control.

His characters build powerful systems, convince themselves they understand every variable, and eventually discover that nature, technology, and human behavior are more complicated than the models they trusted. “Life finds a way” captured that idea perfectly.

Beneath the Cloudline is not arguing that science is inherently bad. The danger comes when hubris outruns understanding and people become so certain of their solution that they stop asking what could go wrong.

Studio Ghibli

Miyazaki’s films, especially Spirited Away, impacted the way I approach worldbuilding.

His worlds feel much older than the characters moving through them. Ruins, machines, buildings, and landscapes seem to carry histories of their own. The story does not stop to explain every strange detail. You are allowed to sense that something larger exists beyond what the characters understand.

Machines feel ancient. Landscapes feel alive. Lost civilizations leave behind systems whose original purpose is only partly understood. That influence appears throughout Halidom in its aerial systems, buried infrastructure, recovered knowledge, and old-world technology. The characters are living inside a history much deeper than any of them initially realize.

Three-Acts

Growing up in the 1980s, the original Star Wars trilogy helped form my baseline understanding of character arcs, especially the journey from an ordinary life into a much larger conflict.

Luke Skywalker begins with a narrow view of the world beyond Tatooine. He leaves home, discovers that the world is more complicated than he understood, and eventually has to decide what kind of person he will become.

Jax follows a different path, but the underlying structure is familiar. He begins with a limited understanding of Halidom, crosses into an unfamiliar world, uncovers truths that were hidden from him, and takes on responsibilities he never expected.

What matters is how a young person changes when the world suddenly becomes larger and far less certain.