I happened on a reality-style PBS show where they send people to live in some past time period. This one was set in Victorian slums. As I watched, it became clear that we haven’t evolved at all in how we treat those in poverty, not to mention the way we trap generations of people in debt. It was depressing and rage-inducing. So debt became an organizing idea that sparked a new take on my junker story. My salvager guy transformed into someone with much more at stake.

I’m a visual writer, and writing for me is typically recording what I see in my mind’s eye. With this story, the opening scene is actually what came first; I found the image of an old man made of wood sitting on a balcony quite striking. I knew right away that he was waiting for something, for someone. But the reason he had traveled so far, his backstory, everything that had brought him up to that moment eluded me.

When writing future scenarios I do keep in mind how fast technology is changing, but how slow human feelings and behavior change in comparison. Technology is going faster and faster, and I don’t think our interactions and feelings can keep up; by the time we’ve figured out one way of using a certain advancement, it seems as if a new one is already here. We sometimes speak as if technology is going to resolve the issues we have as a society and in most cases, I think technology just makes it clearer where the system is the weakest.

My experience in medicine has definitely informed much of the dynamic. It’s a high-stress, high-stakes, highly hierarchical environment. There’s four years of medical school and then three to ten years of residency (depending on the specialty) and the whole process is working your way up the totem pole. My protagonist is in her last year of residency and a big part of her identity has become being a leader in the hospital, being highly reliable, and being able to help people.

This has a lot of dark themes, it doesn’t have a traditional western story structure, and it handles characters who have very little agency. Any one of those, handled badly, could’ve sunk the story. I just didn’t know if any of it was going to come together and actually work in the end. The descriptions of the honeycomb came most easily. I really enjoy writing body horror, so it was nice to indulge in that.

When I got the idea to riff on Bradbury with a story about time tourism to 9/11, I wanted to do two things: one, send up crass American tourist culture, and two, explore Bradbury’s butterfly effect on a different scale, rippling through the volatile and contingent history of the 21st century. But as I dug into “A Sound of Thunder,” it was so rich that it felt very doable to not just allude to Bradbury but to play by some of the same rules he set up.

I actually don’t remember the original prompt, but somehow it got me thinking about the idea of a “reverse selkie”—someone who would be transforming in such a way so that they lose the sea by becoming their “true shape.” Likewise, in this story, love transforms Shoko into her “true shape”—whereas in a traditional selkie story, “love” (usually kidnapping) means being forced out of your real skin.

Around the time Breonna Taylor was murdered, someone tweeted, “She has gone to join the ancestors.” I know that person probably meant she had ascended to this peaceful, almost Wakanda-esque plane where our elders reside, but in the months after her death, I’d heard that phrase used most often when people of color were killed by the police. Those victims were shot, choked to death, or otherwise brutalized.

I hope the ending is surprising in a good way! I didn’t quite know the ending but it became very clear where it should be fairly quickly. I wanted to really play up the tension between a sort of helpless self-indulgence and an intense desire to be better, and somehow it metastasized into something really scary (I hope).

I am a sucker for a hopeful ending. I may be a mediocre-to-terrible organizer myself, but I believe very deeply in the power of organizing, activism, and collective movement to change the world, which is not a pie in the sky statement. It means changing laws, policies, practices, and individual behavior—and there are literal step-by-step instructions for how to do all of these things! But it does require decades (and centuries?) of sustained effort and faith.