The Ocean Planet Tulip

Tulip - It's a planet.  It's the second extra-solar planet that humans have colonized.  And it's a beautiful place - all twelve square miles of it.  That's all the bigger the main island is - the rest of the planet is submerged under a freshwater ocean.  Yep, that's right - barely any salt, but plenty of water, and no continents.  But like I said, it's a beautiful place.  The one island, in fact, looks a bit like a flower as seen from orbit - that's just the pink residuals from the acidic lichen they had to sand-blast off the rocks before dropping down the settlements.  Oh, yeah, the lichen isn't really gone - all the sand-blasting really did was drive the spores deeper into the pores in the rock.

1-2-Writing Workshops Online

Twelve Hour Island

So here's a story idea that could be realistic or surreal: Imagine an island which has come up just to the surface of the ocean.  During high tide, it's under water - during low tide, it's a wide stretch of damp sand.  And people live on this island.  They've anchored their homes into this sand on stilts, and they live on fish and salvage, and their kids swing across ropes from one house to the next.