I wanted to tell a personal story and an epic story without directly telling either one. We would see them both from a distance, in relief. One of the things that I think is powerful about this is that it requires the reader to fill in so many blanks, that the experience requires more reader collaboration.

Lily is the protagonist in a fairy tale when she arrives. She has a problem—her own dissatisfaction with her life—and so she goes on a journey, a sort of quest. She arrives at a magical place and meets the people who are to help her along the way.

“Three Days” started with the image of an island city left standing above a waterless lakebed, stranded by drought. I expected it to be a bleak story, but discovered that I found the setting remarkably beautiful. My own response to it is like that slightly painful yearning of nostalgia for a place or a time that never was.

I had a nightmare that I was hired to tighten bolts on a strange moat, and I had to contend with a spiny octopus that lived near my floating desk. The dream stuck with me, so […] I shaped it into a story.

I’ve got a document loaded with tiny snippets of text and images, titled “idearrhea” because I created it two years ago when I was young and immature, and it was while scrolling through it this October that I rediscovered: “Insomniac society, cosmetic viruses, wet street, fast awake.” That fragment then became “Let’s Take This Viral” over the course of a weekend.

I chose to rewrite “Cinderella” because I was a shy, plain girl who detested and envied the Cinderellas of the world. I wanted to blow their founding myth to smithereens.

For me, words just come on their own, in a torrent, in a flood. I imagine what the character feels and their words come without my forcing them too much, just a little. The words and their meanings (deep meanings, not the ones in the dictionary) are fused in a single outpouring.

Years ago I woke up from a dream in which I had suddenly remembered that I’d killed somebody—although I couldn’t remember why, or how I’d managed to get away with it. […] And then I had to ask myself how a dream-murder could affect anyone except the person who dreamed it.