This will sound weird, but I was dreaming that I was a young kid walking through an airport. In the dream, the first line of the story came to me: “Every time I fall asleep I wake up in a different body.” As soon as I dreamed that sentence, I snapped awake and ran to my office to write it down. The story flowed very smoothly from that—it was one of the easiest and quickest stories I’ve ever written.

My father was an analytical chemist and my mother was a librarian, and I was an intense and constant reader. The three of us suffered in different ways from the death of a child, who was with us “every furlong and fathom,” though not often mentioned by name. What happens in the story is like and unlike my family—as if taking place in a different, more volcanic realm of the multi-verse, with different and more excessive versions of us.

Q: How did Eight Episodes start for you? A: What I recall is imagining a television show that didn’t survive and that slowly, stubbornly revealed its true meanings. When I began work, I probably had only a rough idea of what the mystery was.

I’ve always thought that at heart “The Little Mermaid” was something of a proof against love. It’s more a story of desperation, and escape, and a sort of casual cruelty no one in the story can really help—it’s a cruel story because it’s just the nature of things to be cruel. I wanted to explore the themes of isolation and terrible transformation, and adjust the vectors of yearning a little.

The attraction of steampunk is […] piling together all these disparate aspects and finding a way to make it all work. One way to look at it—this is Jules Verne’s Paris, and the thought of dirigibles mooring to the Eiffel Tower just seems so perfect you wonder why it never happened for real.

Q: It seemed that the bond between the characters was strengthened with each sentence. How did you distill those developing emotions into such a small package? A: How I did it lies in what I did. It’s not a mystery, really—you’ve distilled it in your first sentence. To know more than that, you just examine the details. Each one takes a step from fear and loathing to acceptance and dependence.

Technology can definitely help with some aspects of parenting. Old-fashioned technology provides invaluable help in the form of washing machines, dishwashers, fridges, and vacuum cleaners—not to mention vaccines and other medicines. Newer technologies such as video conferencing mean that you can communicate with your child when you are away from them. In the future, I expect there will be excellent software to entertain and educate children. Instead of a child passively watching a TV program, children could interact with the program.

The first inkling I had of this story came when I was visiting a heron rookery (or, technically, a “heronry”) in my home state of Ohio with my mother. Herons are very nervous, and they often respond to intruders by vomiting down on them—which is both unpleasant for the visitors and very bad for the birds. So we were only allowed to visit because it was winter and the nests were empty.