Scotch whisky is almost certainly the greatest invention of western civilization, but it takes a criminal amount of time to make! I once got to attend a scotch tasting where the host had a 110-year-old bottle with a hand-lettered label. It was magnificent. Clear and bright as a summer’s day. I was transfixed. Here was the physical remains of a hand on a pen, and inside, the liquid distilled from a summer’s grain harvest a century ago. Aged whisky has always been a time capsule.

It started as a novel. This happens sometimes. You can imagine all those footnotes and how they get doled out in a plot line that runs over 300 pages? The main character here never appears in that novel, which was never sent out to editors. It remains one of those projects I stare at and rework and then stare at and then put away. I’m now staring at it again.

I think love is the fundamental vibration of the universe—a mixture of exuberant joy and erotic creation (birds and bees, the earth ripe with spring, the stars in one’s eyes upon seeing one’s lover). Its sensation is a boundary-dissolving limitlessness that allows us to transcend the limited perception of self in order to experience an interconnected merging with other. And to experience love fully means being willing to unwrap the barbed wire of self-protection from our hearts.

I find Enga fascinating to write because she’s such a badass yet significantly disabled. Obviously she has cyborg limbs and technology in her head, which in some ways help her find workarounds for her impairments, but she’s still impaired; she still faces significant challenges that the other characters don’t and would never be mistaken for an able-bodied person. I’ve always seen her as a character who is deeply angry.

The first image I had was of a person being so inflamed by her uncontrollable emotions that she literally burns to death—but also comes back to life. The last part is important because it symbolizes the cyclical nature of life: some days are good, other days are bad; the tide goes out, but it always comes back in; a phoenix dies, but gets reborn. In the same way, it’s so easy to get lost in the heat of an intense emotion and think we’ll always feel this way.

At its heart, this is a genie story. This is the story of the guy who asks a magical figure for a wish and does not get precisely what he asks for. The great power he asked could have been a wizard or a demon, with little rewriting necessary. The story actually began with the anecdote told in its middle about the time traveler commissioning Shakespeare for a love sonnet, and could have been just that, but I wrapped another story around it.

“Witch” can mean so many different things. For me, in this story, it embodies a woman who has defied the patriarchal order, and escaped the social and religious strictures that she was born into, to become a person of power and knowledge. She sees the hypocrisy of her family, and the cruelty of the religious right, and disowns them. There is always a price to pay for such things. Not everyone can be saved. And sometimes, the only way to save yourself is letting go of everything else.

I remember first seeing the trailer for Detective Pikachu and feeling like it was a sign that we’d reached a new stage of what my friend Jay Springett calls “cultural fracking”—the capitalist process of endlessly extracting new value out of the sedimentary layers of meaning that comprise mass culture from the past. I wanted to jump ahead a few stages, to a future where this process had been mostly automated and was now just mashing together genres and franchises more or less at random.

The title came to me first and I envisioned a woman inserting her toes into the bottle openings and dancing on them like a ballerina on toe shoes. That got a little complicated, so I changed it to her rolling on the bottles. The roaches came into the story because she was practicing in the yard and they would naturally be out at night. I had to do research on roaches, look at pictures of them, because I wanted the readers to like Treevia and Oswald so I had to like them too.

The story came about because I was reading about the Trolley Problem, a philosophical thought experiment—basically, the Trolley Problem asks you whether you would pull a lever to save five people from a runaway trolley . . . if it meant guiding said trolley toward one person instead. So: would you, could you, be responsible for one person’s death if it meant saving five more? It’s since sparked a lot of debate as to its usefulness, but for the story, I wanted to explore the personalities this thought experiment brings out in people.