This was one of those stories where the first sentence, “We called it the monster because we could,” really did come first. I kept turning it in my head, and it sort of acted as a key that opened up the rest of the world to me. The sense of place and setting were also foremost in my mind.

Buddhism teaches that life is a cycle of suffering and rebirth, and the only way to escape it is to achieve enlightenment. I’ve always found that theme interesting, especially in how it plays into creating Buddhist characters in wuxia/xianxia stories.

The ships are not human. Their first language isn’t English or any human language. They are mostly telepathic, so everything in the story are their unfiltered thoughts. A human narrator might differentiate between thoughts and even hold back some information from the reader.

I’d say my main inspiration comes from thinking (maybe too much) about divinity. Not from a particular theological perspective, but more as a general concept. If a creator exists for a world, what are its responsibilities to what it creates?

These days, I’m drawn to creating new mythologies, like some of what’s in this story. We want to feel we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, that our experiences are shared and repeating across time and plane. But the gods and stories of the organized religions I’ve been exposed to haven’t resonated much, so this is my version of that meaning-making.

What is also true is that people who carry trauma themselves and haven’t addressed it might inadvertently pass it on to their children. I have personal experience with how trauma can shape a parent-child relationship and how it can propagate. I feel that intergenerational trauma is the ogre in real life. It consumes children and when they grow up it consumes their children as well.

Writers decant ourselves into books. They are our immortality, our legacy. We hope they will outlast us and spin a connection to people we will never know, as books have connected us to people of the past. Nowadays, we are pretty accustomed to the idea of all the people perishing. But what if all the books went, too?

This is one of my “creature stories,” so the gastor came first. I just kept wondering what an animal would look like if it had evolved to live in space. I honestly just had fun coming up with new physiological adaptations, and I even consulted my sister, who studies atmospheric science, for some help.