The thing that seeded this story was a moment in Brent Watanabe’s San Andreas Deer Cam, which hacked a version of Grand Theft Auto to make the POV character a deer. I watched it for two hours straight the first time I saw it; when it walked into the ocean and I realized that I was trying to determine the exact moment it had died, I got unsettled enough to close the window. I never shook that experience and that image, though.

I’m a scientific pantheist. Science is awesome—literally. It inspires awe in me, much the way that I suspect many people are inspired by more traditional religious teachings. So for me, it only makes sense to craft the stories our ancestors might have, had they known more about the universe we live in.

I have no carpentry training, although I have used a saw, hatchet, axe, and hammer back in the day. I had already done research on architecture (it’s a thing of mine), and for the second two Spiritwalker books I researched early nineteenth-century woodworking techniques and tools because they were important for the story. So I used that research as well as some very handy YouTube videos to decide on what details I could reasonably highlight.

The idea for the story came when my wife and I—before we were married—got a dog together, our first dog together, and he was a rescue and a freakazoid when we first got him, and how strange it was suddenly sharing a house with another sentient creature that seemed to take up its own space but also seemed to be constantly watching us, observing us, judging us—he wasn’t, but it felt like he was—and so that is where the strange sense of benign paranoia came out.

Before I knew Jeri’s background, I knew she wasn’t someone who felt at home in space. She found it dark, and deeply lonely. She was the sort of person who, if she wasn’t part of a crew, would come to personally need Cleo, even more than other pilots might. On the other hand, I knew she was someone who chose a life in space, so it couldn’t be completely intolerable for her.

I think Wild Bill represents a very specific kind of harmful, destructive masculinity—one that’s got a very hard surface, but an interior that’s mostly made up of weakness and insecurity. He’s constantly putting pressure on himself, very tired and very alone, and that gives him a strong desire to connect with someone while feeling he shouldn’t. I think this kind of masculinity is damaging both inside and outside.

Earth can recover from anything we do to her, even if it takes entire geological epochs. The chemical processes that resolve as life will continue to churn, and eventually, maybe long after we’re all gone, a fresh diverse web of life will emerge, and it will be one wholly alien to what we see when we look out our window. It’s only the current tenants, including the many who have done nothing on the scale of our own destruction, who are royally screwed.

During the drafting process it became clear that personal agency was something I wanted to explore. The women of “Waterbirds” are its focus, of course—when Celia gets to choose how she presents herself to the world, or Irene breaks away from a difficult situation, I hope readers will see how these experiences are relevant to them as women. But the characters—and therefore we—struggle against social and cultural constraints as well.

I like the idea of steampunk and I enjoy it especially when it’s set against the backdrop of our world, if only an alternate version. I have a problem, though. As a black male, the 1800s is not an American era I like to revisit or even re-envision . . . I find it incredibly difficult to overlay steampunk technology on a society gearing up to fight a civil war over the right to enslave my ancestors. And I find steampunking London to be a well saturated undertaking.