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.

When I was a rookie firefighter with less than a year on the job, I heard a friend speak his last words over the radio. It took me years to write a story in which I could put characters in the position of grappling with the aftermath of a violent death like that. I had no interest in setting it in a firehouse, even a thoroughly fictionalized one. My own feelings about it were too precarious and unresolved.

I think that what people find attractive about finding a parallel self is that it gives you an opportunity to see how your life could have gone but didn’t. I assume everyone fantasizes about that sometimes—what your life would be like if you’d chosen a different career or gone to a different school or a million other choices that cascade down to form a completely different life. In the real world, there’s no way to see what would have happened.

For much of the composition I thought that the narrator would eventually be moved to a violent act of revenge against Ariella’s new guy; some scene where he would use his superior size and strength to pummel the bastard into the ground. As frequently happens. I discovered what the story was really about only upon getting there. One thing it occurs to me that I narrowly escaped was the “fridging” motivation.

The banya holds a hugely important place in Russian culture, and it offers such a rich and interesting landscape, full of centuries-old rituals, special objects, and mythical spirits. It’s significant in its role as a community center, too, as the point where people from all walks of life will come together, however unlikely their meeting may otherwise be. Lately, I’m thinking more deeply about health, wellness, self-care, and community care—as many others probably are as well.

The title, “There Are No Hot Topics On Whukai” was actually inspired by a YouTube video by Sarah Z. about the famous My Immortal Harry Potter fanfiction. A section of the video delves into the internet’s attempt to decipher clues about the author’s identity from notes peppered throughout the fanfic and one of the conclusions is, “There are no Hot Topics in Dubai.” I loved the sheer possibility of that quote out of context.

I know these characters and the arc of their lives so well that it’s easy to track. There’s a point in time, directly after the fourth intended novel, where the Caliph’s vizier is actively trying to thwart them, having moved on from finding them moderately embarrassing to actively disliking them because he thinks they’re deliberately trying to make him look bad, particularly Dabir. Because the caliph esteems them, the vizier can’t have Dabir and Asim removed in an obvious way.