Merc already had a very specific idea of where the story should go, and most of a draft, when they recruited me. They had wanted to write the story on their own, but they needed the climax to revolve around poetry, and they didn’t feel their poetic chops were up to the task. So they asked me for help, as someone who they knew well and who understood the Principality Suns ’verse, and who had a few more poetry publication credits under their belt.

 I believe that the more science finds answers, the more there will be a craving for myth and magic. Why? Because myth and magic speak to that indefinable something in the human soul that needs to believe rules can be broken. Tatter is definitely a trickster figure. That said, I think of her as on the benign side of the line. She’s more a Spider or Coyote than a Mephistopheles. She lacks the selfishness of Hare. Tatter wants to understand what it is to be human.

 I’m drawn toward the idea of simultaneous truths. I like stories that can be interpreted as both magic and not-magic. We interpret our world through an ambiguous mess of the things we can see and the things we can’t see. The things that we can’t see are the hardest to prove, but often the most important. I wanted the ending to reflect the ambiguity of our reality, in which the mundane and the wondrous coexist.

the influences on this piece come more from poetry and theater than from fiction. A poem can be a gut-punch precisely because its focus is so sharp and limited, while its language is wide-ranging and allusive. But formally, the story is not a poem; it’s a dramatic monologue, a kind of soliloquy. Both of these are very old forms of literature indeed—and yet, they are perfectly suited to the relatively new experience of reading online.

I still see so much epic fantasy centered around soldiers and royalty, chosen ones and dark lords, assassins and magicians. And that’s not to say any of those are bad, far from it! But I’ve always wondered, where were the stories of the epic fantasy interns? The postal workers? The low-level bureaucrat, the civic engineer, the dude working at the bodega? Where do these people and their lives and their lines of work, their passions, fit into a strange, magical secondary world?

Storybook romances like those seen in Hollywood are popular for a reason: They offer a sense of certainty and security that doesn’t exist in the real world. Lovers in these stories are “destined” to be together, are “perfect” for each other, feel “completed” by their “true love.” These phrases all carry with them a sense of finality, of having reached the conclusion of the story: You have found your love, and now you’ll never have to worry again.

 With this story, I actually knew the title before anything else. I was watching some nature documentary about elephants, and the phrase “elephants’ crematorium” sprang into my head. While I knew that elephants’ graveyards aren’t actually real, that idea stuck with me and began percolating. The rest of the story came as I developed just why this group of elephants would be self-immolating, and then the parallel human aspects came from that.

 This one’s based on a feeling that I sometimes get about fantasy: that sometimes it’s an escape in all the wrong ways. Please don’t think I’m saying I’m above it. I wrote a six-volume series of middle-grade portal fantasy. But every once in a while, the nagging question comes: Are these stories, with their easily identifiable villains and ultimately solvable problems, a denial of the world as it is, an abdication of the sad truth? That we are watching evil be defeated while our civilization is being nibbled by ducks?

I found middle school to be one of the most awful experiences of my life, so I guess it’s not surprising that I eventually got around to exploring middle school in a story. The SF aspect of the story was something that had been sitting in my idea file for a while, but I couldn’t figure out how to turn it into a story. Lately I’ve written a few young adult and middle grade books, and that felt like the right setting.

In some ways, this story’s a response to how our society puts so much emphasis on romantic attachments, how it ignores the idea that platonic relationships can carry the same amount of importance. This tunnel vision has been instrumental in creating lonely people—so many adults find themselves suddenly starved of affection because all they do is work and go home to family.