There’s an established trope that magic can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing, and I thought, what if I really push that? What if someone without the proper training is a live wire, shocking everything and everyone around them? In that case, you don’t want these kids to know magic until they are emotionally ready to control it.

Space is such a fertile ground for interesting world-building, and I thought this idea of characters living in asteroids to be a fascinating and also somewhat plausible world-building tool. I didn’t think so much of where to place them, so much as I knew where they would be based on the kind of people they are. I always think character first, and everything is in service to that.

I wrote the bulk of the first draft while I was on a cruise ship and experiencing the deep ennui that comes from being on a cruise ship. So that’s intrinsically buried deep in the DNA of this narrative in many mysterious and arcane ways. The second piece of inspiration is that a couple of years ago, on social media, I had seen an image of a mermaid in a bathtub with a bunch of tally marks written on the wall, and that painting really struck me. It’s always fun to take things seriously, and I started thinking about the sequence of events that might lead a person to keep a mermaid in a bathtub against its will, and the logistical challenges of essentially having both some guy in your house, and also a big goldfish.

I wrote “The Girlfriend Experience” while attending Clarion West last year. I masochistically put my hand up for Monday critiques, so it was one of the stories in our very first day of workshops. In retrospect, it might’ve been a subconscious litmus test to find out which of my classmates were prudes. (As it turns out, none of them; Clarion West Class of 2024 is wall-to-wall perverts, and I could not be happier.)

When I sat down to write “Apeiron” I had a decent sense of what I wanted it to be. A lot of the thinking about the story happened off the page, over years. I knew I wanted it to feel like a fable, but with more modern elements. I knew I wanted to expand on creation myths and delve into the psychology of gods. I knew I wanted it to be dreamy. What form all of that would take was the part I was least sure about. I figured I would work that out as I went.