I am in love with the water. I suspect it shows in a few spots in this tale. I spend my free time traveling to the water. (I’m just back from kayaking an hour ago as I reply to this.) I go to Orkney, the Hebrides, Alaska, SoCal, the bayou. At least three to four of those every year. In June, I was on a boat in Alaska, and in August in SoCal (at the beach and on a boat). In January, I’ll be in the bayou. In June, the Scottish Isles . . . and in September, the Alaskan waters also. Somewhere in there, I’ll be in Mexican waters. And weekly, I’m on the river.

I was also thinking about the aesthetics of sadism and immigration. Our president says he wants to build a “big, beautiful wall” at our border with Mexico because he thinks he will always be on the right side of it. But what will happen to human beings if artificial superintelligence decides to continue the USian project of colonization and displacement? If humanity lasts long enough, then an ASI will eventually emerge, one trained on observations made from human behavior.

It’s sort of in the nature of an homage to the local Starbucks. My husband takes me there sometimes when I get stuck on, err, writing, and then we sit there as I drink hot chocolate with peppermint syrup or a chai latte, and I tell him what my problem is and he offers a fix, which  I then proceed to ignore. The shelf where you can take a book and leave a book is at that Starbucks, or at least it used to be; I haven’t been there in a while.

When I’m back in the U.S., I’ve consistently lived in the same neighborhood—Rosslyn, which is in Arlington County, just outside of D.C. It’s where the Foreign Service generally houses us during training. And every time I come back, which is usually at two- or three-year intervals, something else has disappeared. This last time, they ripped down a beautiful little 1950s fire station—the actual Fire Station 10 of the title. It was a shock: It was such a classic building, I was sure they would preserve it, but nothing is sacred around here.

In most fairy tales, protagonists end up with The One because it fits the story: like they’re both royal, or because one has a heart of gold, or sometimes because of a fairy’s meddling. In a story where there’s one royal and one poor but kind-hearted person, of course they get together. This could also be the effect of growing up with Disney’s Golden Age. It’s sort of my same problem with shoujo manga: It’s never a mystery who will end up together.

The seed of this story came to me in a nightmare, actually. I dreamed I was in the suit and something had chewed right through my arm. Usually the inspirations that come with sleep aren’t worth much in the light of day, but I still wrote down every detail I could remember. I hadn’t been getting good sleep since the birth of my second child. Tossing and turning had stirred up some vivid imagery and I put it to use. The rest of the story was developed over several revisions.

I can remember reading, at age eleven or so, Patricia C. Wrede’s Dealing With Dragons, in which Kazul informs Cimorene: “Queen of the Dragons is a totally different job from King, and it’s not one I’m particularly interested in. Most people aren’t.” And that made a great deal of sense to my eleven-year-old self. Growing up on Tamora Pierce and Mercedes Lackey, I was more interested in swords, bows, and hawks than whatever princesses were said to do before they were married off in horse-trading deals.

Because our readers have the expectation of that element of “What if?”, it gives SF authors a bigger sandbox to play in. We’re not quite as confined by the rules of the everyday world, especially in terms of whatever science fictional concept we’re exploring. And I’m not saying that a novel needs to hit you over the head with a sociopolitical message, but there are plenty of works that subtly incorporate them. Even in terms of worldbuilding.

Since I began with the idea of using playing cards as spells, I studied cards and learned that the suits have symbolic associations originally based on the Tarot. Take a suit and a number and you could imagine an effect based around that combination. Since that effect wasn’t specific and could vary, I imagined that there was a kind of gambling element to the magic—that you had to choose very carefully the effect you were trying for. Try too much with a card, try to exceed the value, and it might fail to work.

Many of my stories for Lightspeed in particular are challenges I set myself, and this one began as an attempt to write the entire story in the AIsource caretaker’s voice. I discovered while doing it that Sacrid really wanted to heard. One reason I never described her—though I might if I return to her story, a genuine possibility—is that her rebellious ways do presumably include the cosmetic, and honestly, my wildest efforts to be outrageous could very easily devolve to quaint.