How did “Starpoop” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

In March of 2022, I attended the annual conference in Orlando for the International Conference of the Fantastic in Arts (ICFA), an excellent gathering of academics, writers, and publishers that I have participated in for over a decade. For this particular conference I had one of my foster children in tow, an adorable and mostly well-behaved three-year-old. As much as I love the conference, I discovered there’s no quicker way to become invisible than to walk around with a toddler at an academic conference. People I’ve known for years developed sudden blindness and a preference for taking the long way around rather than pass where we were sitting. Left alone with my son sleeping in his stroller, I started writing about COVID-19 and the strain of being a mom and having an unsure foundation (which is one of the very conditions of parenthood). As the story developed, my tweenage love for Penny Robinson in the original Lost in Space series surfaced as well. I will always be a geek for cheesy science fiction TV, especially from the 1960s-1980s. While I was finishing the story back home after the conference, my little toddler was reunited with his biological family. Reunification is the goal of foster care, but it can also leave behind a profound grief and heart-shaped hole where the child used to live and laugh every day.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

I would love an optimized writing space, and my house is large enough for one. Somewhere within these 2,400 square feet I should be able to carve out a dedicated area, right? Choosing to be a foster mom, however, means that I often have children of all ages running underfoot and committing themselves to penetrating the exact spaces I don’t want them near—supply closets full of snacks, utility closets full of household dangers, an office with any computers or devices they can use to play Roblox or Minecraft. I also foster homeless cats, many of whom delight in jumping on aforesaid equipment or knocking over pages of manuscripts. One of my hobbies is watercolor painting, and kids and cats also delight in raiding brushes, paper, and paints. The end result is that I’m often a fugitive with a laptop, writing in whatever corner I can carve out. For awhile I worked in my walk-in closet, which is certainly big enough but lacks ventilation. Oxygen is really important to my career as a human being.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

A few years ago I was guest speaker at a friend’s undergraduate fiction writing class. It’s a class I have taught and enjoyed teaching. The students were terrifically attentive. I gave them all the writerly advice I could and we had a great question and answer session. All was quite lovely. But when I left that classroom on that beautiful sunny afternoon, I also left behind interest in offering advice to other writers. I was depleted, but in a good way. I was the spaceship Voyager (One or two, doesn’t matter) leaving behind the planet Advice. In an emergency writing situation (can you imagine what those look like?) I could repeat what other smart folks say, I could point to books I’ve found helpful, I could even steer people toward mentors or conferences that might be beneficial—but luckily no crisis has arisen. The internet is full of people offering advice. I’m committed now to letting people find their own path. I’m a big fan of Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius, philosopher and emperor, said it more than two thousand years ago: it’s okay to not have an opinion about something.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m working on many things, but very slowly. Recently I went to Paris and stood in a museum and looked at Claude Monet’s final series of Water Lilies. These are enormous gorgeous canvases that he had promised to donate to France, but his physical and mental health were suffering and he’d endured eye surgeries that left him vision impaired. He was an almost-blind octogenarian making small progress and then reworking and reworking the paint again, dissatisfied. Obsessed, maybe, I hope to be writing when I’m even older than Monet, when I’m a centenarian, but have no idea what writing and publishing will look like in the decades to come. Maybe writers won’t have keyboards. Maybe readers will downland fiction directly to our brains. Who can say? My one hope is that I’ll have my own office by then. And that the robot cats don’t knock everything over.