How did “The Hole in the Garden” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This story came about in part as a by-product of research for another project, and in part because I wasn’t entirely in my right mind. I began work on a new novel in the first half of 2022 (Graffiti on the Wall of the Universe) and decided I needed to know more about the holographic principle, which led me to the Leonard Susskind book, The Black Hole War, and then I had black holes on my mind. Then, in the latter half of the year, I had to have emergency oral surgery, the consequence of which was that I couldn’t eat solid foods for roughly eight weeks. Somewhere in the middle of that liquid-diet fugue state, I thought of a micro-singularity in a garden.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

My writing process is that I write until I am no longer entertained, and then I stop and either go back to the beginning to fix what made it no longer entertaining, or I wait until I am entertained again. Since I was writing this while in perpetual starvation mode, I was easily entertained; I wrote it pretty fast. The downside was that I had no idea if it was any good, because I couldn’t trust myself to be able to tell.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

I was stuck before I got started. I loved the idea of a civilization that deliberately nurtured a singularity for the short-term gain of clean energy, knowing they were handing an inescapable nightmare scenario down to their descendants. But I couldn’t figure out a way to tell it without boring myself and the reader, and telling an overlong story. Then I got the idea to frame the scientifically dense parts within a story told to a child, which I think worked great. As for where that idea came from, I’m going to go back to blaming the fugue state.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I’m reading two nonfiction books right now. One is an oral history of Hollywood, and another is something called The Atlas of Cursed Places, from which I’m hoping to find a few story ideas. As for inspiration from other writers, I have been reading very little fiction of late, but I will say that the child’s story element of this short story was probably at least partly inspired by Neil Gaiman’s work.

What are you working on lately?

I’m writing this about two weeks before my latest novel, Graffiti on the Wall of the Universe, comes out. It’s the third book in the Sorrow Falls series—after The Spaceship Next Door and The Frequency of Aliens. Hopefully, by the time this interview lands, I will be working on book four in my Tandemstar series. Fingers crossed that future-me has his act together.