I’m constantly thinking about the way art influences and moves us to action, and how those actions can change the world. Not all resistance is violent or visible. Not all art is designed to intentionally create a change, but you can never predict what’s going to stick a match to someone’s fuse, or how long that art will continue to work its magic. I think it’s important to create things regardless of whether or not you think it’s going to appeal to a wider audience, because you are the only one capable of expressing the thoughts inside your head.

I think as a species we’re terrified of things that are smarter than us, and that’s mostly because that’s how we identify our superiority over the natural world: We’re smarter than it. So, the idea that there could be something small and sleek that is infinitely more canny than us immediately makes us scared. And what do humans do when we’re terrified? We make them into monsters so we can summon our peers to the hunt. As for what they are to me, well, that’s a long story best told in another fable, yes?

One day, when I was hiking alone, I was seized by the certainty that I would round the next bend and encounter my parents—not my parents as they are today, in their sixties and living several states away, but in their twenties, not yet married. Would they recognize me? Would I want them to? What would I want them to know? And what of my telling might undo me? I carried the seed of the idea to the Clarion workshop in summer 2016, where instructor Ted Chiang sat us down and—succinctly, without consulting any notes—explained to us precisely how time travel could work, and the issues this poses for free will.

“The Final Blow” is the first-ever story in my “The Gods Have Gone” universe. As a fan of fantasy, I’ve always wanted to create a fantasy setting where there is no metal. Development of metal opens up the inevitability of advanced technical development, so what kind of stories could be told in a setting without metal? I’ve played with this concept in my “New World” mythos, which consists of two stories (“Victim with a Capital V” and “Throwdown,” which are in the anthologies Unfettered II and Unfettered III, respectively). Those stories are set in our world, but one set 2,000 years after bioengineered bacteria destroy all metal.

The inspiration for the spider drones came from the artist Louise Bourgeois, who did a series of spider sculptures in bronze and steel. Her spiders are terrifying, dynamic and futuristic. They are inert but very much alive and the experience of viewing them at SFMOMA changed me. The spider, to me, is industrious and beautiful. From a biomechanics perspective, there is no piece of man-made technology that approaches its sophistication. I imagine the singularity as occurring in a place where nature and technology are indistinguishable.

I’ve had this image in my head for a long time—two old friends, moon colonists and blue-collar workers, whacking golf balls off a lunar escarpment and jawing about the first time anyone (Alan Shepard, Apollo Astronaut) ever teed off on the moon. I’m not particularly a golf fan, but the image was so compelling I was determined to build a story around it. The second inspiration was decidedly less fun—the heart-wrenching experience of watching my mother-in-law slowly decline with dementia over a period of about fifteen years.

I have a word quota, best described as, “If I get 1000 words down, I did not fail today.” I try to get substantially more done, and when zooming along on a project that’s going well, I manage two or three or four times that much. In practice, this does not mean I produce the equivalent amount in publishable fiction, as a substantial number of stories trail off and must be abandoned, and some, inevitably, don’t find anybody who loves them.

The language of shipping and fandom is part of the lexicon, at least among me and my friends, so dropping a little reference doesn’t feel like a big deal to me. I have complicated feelings about fanfic in general, in that I think it is great tool, particularly for people who aren’t represented in mainstream media, to appropriate and contextualize mass culture in interesting and vital ways (plus it’s a fun, fulfilling thing to participate in in a world often lacking in pleasures), but I also sort of worry about how fanfic can function as free advertising for massive media conglomerates.

Being a publishing writer requires a certain amount of inherent arrogance—on at least some level, you believe your work is better than the rest of the slush pile and deserves to be read. But you’ll need that arrogance to sustain you through the years of rejection and apathy headed your way. I have a toddler, a marriage, and a menial full-time job, so my “creative process” mostly looks like carving out what writing time I can at erratic intervals, then feeling frustrated with myself for not having the energy to turn out anything good. Hopefully this situation will improve as my kid gets a little older and more independent!