The Bolton Strid is a real place that really exists and I really want to go there, except for the part where I am a fairly clumsy person and I would very shortly be swept away forever, and my friends would miss me. So the story started with the Strid.

I wanted to be vague about what the spells do and what type of monster these women are, but all the details are based on folklore from Slovenia and neighboring regions. There really is a traditional creature that splits in two and hops around leaving a single footprint! “Novak” is a Slovenian name meaning “new,” which the family got because they used to move around a lot and were newcomers wherever they lived.

As I began writing this story, my uncle was dying. My father’s family is from Mexico and sometimes they practice interesting ancestral medicine. One of the treatments for cancer and leprosy involves boiling a vulture, bones and all, down to a thick stew and making the sick person eat it. A tía from Mexico somehow caught a vulture, killed it, and fed vulture stew to my dying uncle. I was trying to explain to a bewildered friend the reasoning.

I love writing romance. I’ve published a few in my career, but have always longed to write more. I especially love the intersection of love stories and fantasy. There’s something so immersive about that space. Whether it’s urban fantasy, YA, contemporary fantasy or epic fantasy, I always enjoy novels that don’t shy away from depicting a full-blown romance or love story, even if it ends tragically.

I wasn’t meaning to write horror with this one, but every time I try to go fantasy or science fiction or western or literary or crime, the blood always seems to bubble up into something . . . maybe horrific? Horror-adjacent? The beats and techniques of horror are what I know best, I guess, so they’re the scaffolding for most everything I do. You tell the story that feels true to you, and for me that’s horror.

I include some humor in most of my writing. The guy in the back of my head who does the actual creating seems to have a natural sense of how much to use and when to use it. I don’t argue with him because he’s almost always right.

I was riding the city bus, late at night, and I saw a bus stop ad for something I can no longer remember—it wasn’t a good ad—the ad’s mascot was a smiling GPS pin. You know the location pin in Google Maps: a red circle that tapers into a long tail? That, with a smiley face. I remember being revolted. Why does everything need a face? I thought of other ads that personify unlikely things by tacking on a smile—most horrifyingly, the kiwi fruit whose smile is carved from his skin.

I love the Alice books, as well as Carroll’s other work, but like a lot of readers and scholars, I’ve wondered about what actually happened between him and the Liddell family, particularly Alice—and I’ve wondered what it would have been like to be Alice, famous for being the heroine of Carroll’s book. She had a life, by the way—a very rich life apart from being a literary character. But to us, she will always be Alice in Wonderland.

I spent a large chunk of my childhood in Gainesville, Florida, where the local fauna are as much a part of your property as the front door. We had gators in our yard after it rained, an armadillo living under the porch, and a long pile of rocks against one side of the house that sheltered a huge snake. Every so often, we’d find one of its shed skins wedged between the rocks.

Refractin, the cosmetic procedure, was born of a few of my obsessions pooling together—modern art, Vantablack, body modification, and the act of reading people’s nonverbal communication. Oh, and the one illustration of the Terrible Trivium from The Phantom Tollbooth, which scared me so much as a kid I had to skip that chapter.