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.

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.”