Could you tell us how you arrived at the concept for “Thaw”?

I had a lot of scraps of ideas that hadn’t coalesced into a story yet, and after a long enough period of agitating in my head, they all clumped together. For example, I had this idea of a tidal-locked water world whose only surface liquid water was on the side locked to its star. I liked the idea but couldn’t really get a plot to adhere to it. I’d also been playing around with the idea of a terraforming project, as experienced by someone or something that was adapted to the original conditions of the terraformed planet. And at some point, courtesy of the internet, I was introduced to pictures of stargazy pie—“a Cornish dish,” Wikipedia says, “[ . . . with] fish heads (and sometimes tails) protruding through the crust, so that they appear to be gazing to the stars.” I jotted down the phrase “fish staring at stars” because it tickled me, and we can see where that led.

(At one point, the working title of this story was “Stargazy,” but I figured that it was a joke that too few people would get.)

Then there are scraps of my ongoing fascination with xenofictive perspectives, and with nonhuman and transhuman ways of relating to one’s body, and then the story-idea-ball also absorbed a lot of reading and thinking I’d been doing about how we construct a sense of self and how we define the boundaries of our sense of self. At one point I’d had a conversation about corpus callosotomies—procedures which sever the major connection between the two hemispheres of the brain—and the strange and fascinating things that seem to come up in the experience of people who have had them, including some indications that suggest that the hemispheres may to some extent have separate seats of consciousness which are blurred together in our self-image so that we perceive a single, unitary consciousness. My friend made a reference to the human experience of an individual self as a “species-wide corpus callosotomy,” and I got to thinking about a species which could blend their consciousness together. It’s not the first time I’ve played with distributed and shared consciousnesses in my fiction, but it may be the first story I’ve finished that centers those ideas.

This is such a fun story to read. What made you keep this in the form of a flash piece, and would you consider expanding it?

Honestly, I wanted to challenge myself and to learn something from the constraints. I have trouble keeping things short when I write, but tightening things up is such a powerful tool in an author’s toolkit, and I wanted to practice. So the guiding principle here was to find how minimally I could tell the story.

Looking back at all of the worldbuilding I wanted to cram in, I realize that I may have been a bit ambitious in my scope. (This is a pretty good indication of why I struggle to keep things short.)

But at some point after I started working on this, I got word that Lightspeed was looking for flash, so that gave me a specific goal and a hard word count to aim for. By the time I finished it, I think the flash drought had already been resolved, but I still had a complete story to show for my efforts, so I counted it as a win.

Given how much effort I put into compressing the story to fit it into a flash format, I think there’s definitely room to expand it. In fact, I suspect that if I open some metaphorical lid, several alien snakefish will immediately erupt from the container like that classic can-of-snakes prank.

What has been your biggest struggle as a writer? And how have you worked around it?

I struggle a lot with maintaining focus on any given project, which is why I finish so many more short-form works than long-form works despite always wanting to go long. I’d love to say that I’ve found a way of working around it that really truly works for me, but I’ve still got a long way to go. What I have found is two things:

First, if I make sure to get a little bit of writing in as often as I can, sooner or later enough of my scattered fragments of attention will fall on some project to give it heft and structure. Then the sunk cost fallacy starts to kick in, and it starts to seem like it would be a real shame not to do something with all these words that have somehow ended up in this project. That usually gets me to about 80% of the way to completion, where I pretty consistently start hating it and everything I’ve ever written and every idea I’ve ever had—it’s a known bug; hasn’t been patched yet—at which point I have to switch to my backup motivational source, which is a mixture of grit, determination, and spite. And then when it’s about 95% done, I can see the finish line, and desperation to just be through with it will carry me to the end. It’s not the most fun or emotionally well-calibrated process, but knowing that it’s a pattern does help. There’s some value to being able to say, “I know I feel like this is objectively terrible, but that doesn’t mean it is objectively terrible, it just means I’m about 80% of the way through.”

Second, having someone to bounce ideas back and forth with is incredibly helpful, especially if they’re excited about reading my writing and able to articulate what they like and why. It’s a bit like being able to borrow someone else’s enthusiasm when mine starts to flag. It also offers me a way to connect with people, which is valuable to me as an inveterate introvert. Some of the most productive writing periods I’ve ever had were when I could toss someone scraps of fresh writing and get insight and enthusiasm back within a few days.

What made this particular ending the best place to land?

The purely pragmatic answer is that that’s where the word count barrier was! But as to what I fought to include in that word count, I have a fondness for stories that don’t fully resolve. They play with the idea that, like life, things don’t always have a neat beginning and ending; it’s more to do with when we start and stop paying attention, or when we construct something on which to hang significance. Stories that find ending spots that satisfy but don’t resolve feel more lifelike to me. They also leave a little ragged edge for the reader to play with: an invitation to imagine what’s happening outside the story’s frame.

In terms of the world of the story, ending with the oncoming freeze bookends nicely with the beginning thaw. The story is tucked neatly into a single season, and it gets to rest on the emotional ledge of this fundamental cycle of the world potentially vanishing before the eyes of these sea snakes and any other sentient beings in this world. Post-apocalyptic fiction fascinated me, growing up, and I find that the moment of realization that an apocalypse is coming offers its own distinct bite.

Is there a project you are currently working on? And if not, are there any themes, objects, or news that might be tickling your fingers?

Too many to list! And none are progressing quickly. Bureaucratic intrigue and urban fantasy themes seem to be cropping up in several of them lately, and I want to play a lot more with notions of self and identity and nonhuman biologies. I’ve also been doing a lot of listening and reading that has me wanting to try my hand at horror, which I’ve only rarely attempted before. And I’ve just dived headlong into a new gardening hobby, so I’m excited to see how that’s going to show up in my subconscious. And who knows what other mélange of miscellaneous idea seeds will coalesce on any of those frames, or others?