I wrote this story at Clarion West, where one of our instructors was the Australian editor Jonathan Strahan. I’d grown up in Australia, so I got it in my head that I’d write an Australia story for him. I’d also been tempted to have a go at a classic space survival kind of plot, and the two ideas fused when I hit on the parallel between central Australia and Mars—two red, arid landscapes that, to an outsider, don’t seem capable of supporting life. That image was really important at the beginning.

I’m a knitter. I’m not a great knitter, I’ve never knitted a full-on sweater. But I like knitting, and I love the idea of knitting as code. That there’s something cosmic about it if you can really tap into that code. I mashed that idea into the angel idea, which was inspired by another piece of fiction I read recently, and spun it all out from there. Oh, I also spin wool. I think we can always use more stories about fiber arts.

I got the concept for this story from a picture I saw online. It was this giant head suspended in front of an altar. I actually don’t remember it that well because everytime I look at it I think, that’s not how I remember it! But when I saw it I thought, wow, that’s a really terrible way to honor a god and the story of Sri spun from there. The way the story is told is inspired by the oral tradition of storytelling.

This is actually the second in a series of shorts I hope to write one day. And yes, they’re all centred around rainmaking. The inspiration came from the lack of water rights I experienced in Zaria. While I grew up in megacities or locales where every home either had a borehole system, or water supply from the government, Zaria had wells instead. And these wells, they swelled or sank in tune with the weather.

For God’s sake, write the kind of stories you’re not comfortable with. Don’t stick to plots you can write in your sleep. Bother yourself. Be nervous about whether you’re going too far, or revealing too much. Don’t do exactly what you did last time. Don’t try to figure out the formula of a popular market. Be like the person who accidentally walks on stage naked. Don’t worry about your dignity.

We don’t need dystopian stories anymore: we need stories for a dystopian audience. There is overlap, and this need not be a radically new thing; there are excellent examples across the history of SF/F. The trend I see, that I want to see more of, is speculative fiction as a medicine for our existential despair—and ideally not just as a numbing agent. There are many ways to accomplish this.

Midland, Texas was the closest big town to where I grew up, and it had a mall, and in that mall there was the Gold Mine—this videogame arcade. Every once in a while, while our moms were shopping, a friend and me would get ditched there with a couple dollars for quarters, which we’d always blow through in about ten seconds. Or, we’d lose them even faster when we put them up for the next game.

I started playing around with the ideas that people believe they know everything about their partners and that they wouldn’t change a thing about them. If such an idealist were confronted with multiple variations of their partner, with one of them being the original, would they be able to find the exact one? Would they be tempted to pick one with more desirable traits than the original?

I had been thinking about mermaid stories for a while, because mermaids are having a real cultural moment right now and I wanted to write something about them. I hit on the idea of doing a “reverse selkie” story: about a human woman who removes her skin to become a fish. But I didn’t have a plot for it. Then I had a dream about salmon, and when I woke up I realized that, for a salmon, a human marriage would be a magical fairy story.

I’ve been reading corporate memos my entire adult life (I think most of us have) but it wasn’t until Covid that those memos started to come off as slightly dark, if only for the things that it was assumed we already knew. Like, if you took a random corporate memo from during the pandemic back in time and showed it to someone from, say, 2010, they’d have a lot of questions. (Also, and this is definitely related, more often than not I find corporate memos inadvertently hilarious.)