A couple of winters ago, trudging up an icy hill, I realized I could revisit elements I loved from one of my first trunked novels. I could come at it fresh and make the fundamentals into short stories. That meant I could junk all the characters, setting, and plot—and still feel like the years I spent writing it were good for something beyond skill growth.

What I’d like readers to take away from this is that there’s value to art. That it is in fact an essential service that provides us with something that can improve our lives just by being exposed to it. To give an example from both film and real life, take the story depicted in Sing Sing.

I went with “tome” because it just has a more mysterious image and cadence to it, and also, I liked the idea of poor students lugging around a massive cursed book as opposed to something more mass market-sized.

Concrete is the most widely used human-made substance; it’s something most people have encountered in some form. And it isn’t biodegradable. I imagined concrete stifling the living, breathing earth beneath.

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.