Given all of that, how did my consciousness end up in this particular skull, right here? Why do I have an experiential reality, and why is it (to the best of my awareness) singular, distinct, and specific to this body, this place, and this time? I’m a consciousness, you’re a consciousness, why don’t I have the inherent access to your experiences and not my own? Why does my “I” pointer point where it does?

I definitely envisioned [magic] as somewhat secretive, a hidden and inherited talent shared either with others who possess it, or with close loved ones. I conceptualized it as similar to empathy, in some respects. Unlike magic in this story, most people are capable of feeling deep empathy. (Whether they choose to indulge it or not is a very different question). Some people, however, inherit a much more intense capacity for feeling empathy toward others—which can make relationships much more enduring and satisfying and joyful, and can absolutely saturate the world in emotional color.

I don’t think I’m a particularly close observer; I am sometimes thoroughly blind, to the point where I am surprised by explosions that end with me protesting, “I didn’t know you were upset. I’m not telepathic.” I never take notes, but some of what I do retain is internalized, and winds up on the page. Here, it was a case of realizing, “This man and wife cannot exist in a vacuum and it already feels like they do, so I better give them a hint of a larger existence; here, I’ll have the protagonist visit his father.”

I have always found the dynamics in nail salons and spas to be as fascinating as they are uncomfortable: There is this strange intimacy, this literal erasure of distance, that contrasts so sharply with the transactional nature of the service being performed, and with the socioeconomic gap that often exists between customer and worker. When I first heard about fish pedicures, I thought they were weird and funny but essentially harmless. Then I read an article about how the Garra rufa fish don’t naturally eat dead skin; they are induced to do so through starvation.

I’ve found I’m writing about a certain kind of nostalgia—a sense of loss/longing for a present moment which has eluded our grasp. Much of this, I imagine, comes from parenthood. My son is headed off to college next year and there’s a great awareness of just how quickly time passes and how easily we can fall into the illusion of having “more time.” I’m thinking here of the moments when our children ask us to play but we’re too busy (often for legitimate reasons!) and yet, soon they’ve grown and are no longer asking us to chase them around the house.

The seed of the idea came, appropriately enough, when we were contemplating the process of collaboration. It occurred to us that, when writing a tale together, we were in effect inhabiting one mind . . . We can’t recall who exactly it was who had the original idea inspired by that insight, but we batted it around as we do, then got stuck in. Eric began the tale, did a couple of thousand words, then passed it on to Keith to finish. There was little plotting done between us—we simply let our respective subconscious minds take the idea where it would go.

The original inspiration for the island came from a Smithsonian Magazine article about North Brother Island, which is located between Manhattan and the Bronx. It was once the location of Riverside Hospital, designed to contain smallpox and other infectious diseases in the late nineteenth century. The island got repurposed a few times over the years, becoming housing for war veterans and later a rehab center for heroin addicts. Then, it was abandoned in 1963 and has since become a place reclaimed by nature.

I’ve been really into establishing “space habitat folklore,” and gremlins are a big part of that. My gremlins are inspired by the originals—the ones that would go around causing malfunctions in airplanes, and in an off-Earth habitat where your survival is dependent on all your machines working well, gremlins would be a natural way to explain random malfunctions. The gremlin trap is a bit of worldbuilding that I’ve had in my back pocket for a while. The idea here is that Martian kids build these traps as a way to learn basic mechanical principles.