I love tropes as a starting point for stories—you can twist them, subvert them, play them for laughs. I poke fun at artificial gravity in this story, but I can see why it’s so common. It’s easier and cheaper to make a movie where the space station has artificial gravity. In short stories, you have to choose what you want to spend your words on. Science fiction often has a lot of weird stuff going on.

One setting in the story was inspired by my own experience, and that’s the cemetery. I had firmly in mind the Sauk City, Wisconsin, cemetery where Arkham House founder August Derleth is buried. I believe it’s the St. Aloysius Cemetery. I had visited it with my then-girlfriend, on a sort of pilgrimage. I was struck by the wrought-iron arch and by the hair-raising “holy and wholesome” sign (which is a quote from 2 Maccabees 12:46, by the way).

Writing different POVs is one of the seductions of the writing life. Aliens, whether from inside or outside, can be an interesting challenge. The truth is that we are only one of the nearly infinite possibilities for seeing the world, and that we actually only take in a small amount of data from the world, upon which we build our sense of everything. Tweaking that just a little can give you a wildly different experience, and can make for a mind-altering experience.

There was this girl I really liked and we seemed to really click, but it never got off the runway. Sometimes I feel like I exude a sort of field that fucks up potential romantic relationships. Arthur in the story has a more literal kind of field. Originally there was going to be a sad ending, but everyone who read it wanted a happy one, so I threw in the second chance that I kind of wished I’d gotten in real life.

We know now that there are biological viruses and bacteria that, for their own benefit, alter the behavior of their host organism. So what would get a brain program propagated? What kinds of effects on behavior might make it likely to be spread among host brains? The odd title also comes from biology. Some speculate that sex evolved as a way to slow parasitism. This is called the Red Queen strategy. So with that ringing in my mind, I named the parasite code RedKing.

There’s only one other story about Rand-later-Tybalt that’s currently available; that’s “Forbid the Sea,” which can be downloaded from my website. And of course, Tybalt himself is the romantic lead in my urban fantasy series, so it’s not like there’s a dearth of him around. As to why I wanted to tell the story I told . . . there are two hollow victories here, one over the King, his father, and one over the plague. I wanted to contrast them. I think I did okay.

I drew on residential schools, both in Australia and in Canada (for Aboriginals and First Nations), as a model for the institution where Catherine and Johanna are educated—I knew about their existence, but had naïvely assumed they were further in the past than that, and found out this was very much not the case. The way in which the Galactic and Dai Viet rub against each other (and profoundly misunderstand one another) was drawn from real-life interactions in colonial Indochina.

It was the third week of Clarion and our instructor said he would like to see me write something more personal, something that “bled” for me. So I sat down and asked myself, “What scares me? What’s personal?” My mother is schizophrenic, and could not take care of herself, much less children. I remembered trying to explain what it was like growing up with her by saying it was like having a large, malfunctioning machine, one that could harm you at any moment and that you could not turn off.