The idea for the story came when my wife and I—before we were married—got a dog together, our first dog together, and he was a rescue and a freakazoid when we first got him, and how strange it was suddenly sharing a house with another sentient creature that seemed to take up its own space but also seemed to be constantly watching us, observing us, judging us—he wasn’t, but it felt like he was—and so that is where the strange sense of benign paranoia came out.

Before I knew Jeri’s background, I knew she wasn’t someone who felt at home in space. She found it dark, and deeply lonely. She was the sort of person who, if she wasn’t part of a crew, would come to personally need Cleo, even more than other pilots might. On the other hand, I knew she was someone who chose a life in space, so it couldn’t be completely intolerable for her.

I think Wild Bill represents a very specific kind of harmful, destructive masculinity—one that’s got a very hard surface, but an interior that’s mostly made up of weakness and insecurity. He’s constantly putting pressure on himself, very tired and very alone, and that gives him a strong desire to connect with someone while feeling he shouldn’t. I think this kind of masculinity is damaging both inside and outside.

Earth can recover from anything we do to her, even if it takes entire geological epochs. The chemical processes that resolve as life will continue to churn, and eventually, maybe long after we’re all gone, a fresh diverse web of life will emerge, and it will be one wholly alien to what we see when we look out our window. It’s only the current tenants, including the many who have done nothing on the scale of our own destruction, who are royally screwed.

During the drafting process it became clear that personal agency was something I wanted to explore. The women of “Waterbirds” are its focus, of course—when Celia gets to choose how she presents herself to the world, or Irene breaks away from a difficult situation, I hope readers will see how these experiences are relevant to them as women. But the characters—and therefore we—struggle against social and cultural constraints as well.

I like the idea of steampunk and I enjoy it especially when it’s set against the backdrop of our world, if only an alternate version. I have a problem, though. As a black male, the 1800s is not an American era I like to revisit or even re-envision . . . I find it incredibly difficult to overlay steampunk technology on a society gearing up to fight a civil war over the right to enslave my ancestors. And I find steampunking London to be a well saturated undertaking.

John Hunter was a medical revolutionary during perhaps the most wretchedly disgusting period in all of Western medical history: England in the 1700-1800s. At a time when most physicians treated the symptoms of a disease without trying to comprehend the cause, Hunter was a dogged experimentalist who was absolutely intent on understanding the inner workings of the human body. And in order to study the human body, Hunter needed—human bodies.

I actually find setting pretty difficult, even though it’s one of my favorite aspects of a story when done well. Usually I think of myself as a more character-oriented writer. But I love writing about physicality, especially the small details like how one character eats versus another, or the sensation of leaving gravity. In this piece, I was making a conscious effort to pay attention to specificity, because this character has very little past or future. She’s entirely invested in the present moment.

I love that so much contemporary SF is bringing #ownvoices narratives to the surface. My attempt is to do that while directly confronting current events, politics, social justice, in provocative narratives that interrogate the foundations of SF, dismantle and demolish them, then recycle the debris to build a new house where a new kind of SF can live, thrive, and grow. It’s a work in progress.

Merc already had a very specific idea of where the story should go, and most of a draft, when they recruited me. They had wanted to write the story on their own, but they needed the climax to revolve around poetry, and they didn’t feel their poetic chops were up to the task. So they asked me for help, as someone who they knew well and who understood the Principality Suns ’verse, and who had a few more poetry publication credits under their belt.