I like starting in the middle and then backing up. In “Hypnopompic Circumstance” that middle was “Thomas’s first encounter with the alien was terrifying.” It works for the reader because now there are a lot of questions in need of answers (who is the alien, why is Thomas the only one encountering it, how many encounters have there been, etc.) which keeps them interested. Possibly as important, by starting with this kind of sentence, I’m interested in writing more.

These caretakers may be doing their genuine best to help Jain and Stromile, but they don’t understand what they’re doing. Humans need food and water and shelter more than they need understanding, but it’s a close thing. We are all driven by this mad desire to have other people really get us, to make the neural ghost in someone else’s head as close as possible to the one we carry in ours. The caretakers can keep Jain alive, but they’ll never get closer to knowing her than Stro did, and the facsimile is uniquely painful for that reason.

“The Giving One,” like all the Burnt Empire legends, is loosely based on a legend from the great story cycle, The Mahabharata. I first wrote about it in my Mahabharata Series published in India over a decade ago. I adapted it freely and brought it into line with the timeline and character history of the Burnt Empire trilogy, especially A Dark Queen Rises.

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’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.