“Diamonds & Toads” was one of my favorite fairy tales when I was young. I think I just liked the visual of roses and snakes falling out of people’s mouths. (Still do, TBH.) When I reread it as an adult, though, I was struck by how sorry I felt for the oldest daughter.

If we are to have any chance at averting a climate disaster, we must do more than just reduce our carbon output—we need to get to carbon zero or better. “Carbon Zero” explores the human cost of what may become humanity’s last chance.

It started as most stories do: a what-if that wouldn’t leave my mind, that demanded an answer. What if you had someone with precognition that somehow couldn’t see their own future? Their own tomorrow, a mystery. Initially, there was something a little funny in that idea, but as often happens with my stories, the little bit of humor caved in.

I guess I am not the only one who feels that time flows faster and faster nowadays. The pace of life in the twenty-first century is much faster than that in the twentieth or before. We all try to do more things with the same amount of time and achieve more. If there is a product that can make you more efficient in a time unit, definitely some people will be willing to use it.

When I was much younger, I wrote a lot of stories that were told in the vein of traditional epic fantasy novels, and I wanted to write a more recent version of those. Specifically, one that involved dragons. I was really drawn to the idea of a story that portrayed the complex dynamics of romantic relationships within a fantasy world, and so this story was my attempt at capturing that.

I’m a working scientist doing biological research. There is some overlap in my day-to-day work and the science of these stories, so doing the research to write them was a familiar, cathartic, and supremely challenging experience at the same time. I have to be vague now, but I hope there’ll come a time when I can share that in more detail.

A friend gave me a zine on the queer language of flowers and flower symbolism. There are a couple nods to these in the story, or to specific color groupings. I also took inspiration from wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest.

The initial spark, the image I built the entire story around, was a scene from the FromSoft game Echo Night where the player must return the eye of a large fish mural. It’s not a particularly important part of the game, but I found the concept charming and wanted to turn it inside out.

I have always been fascinated by Yoruba mythology, especially the many untold stories it contains. Eshu is a god who isn’t represented enough in the few stories that draw inspiration from Yoruba myths.

I’m excited by all the books by African writers that have come out in recent years, we need more of that. I would love to see more work drawing on African story forms and indigenous knowledge systems, especially from southern African countries.