I knew this story needed to be told for the majority in second person because of the format and the concept: It’s a video game. And, as mentioned above, I wanted to harken back to the old RPGs I loved with the “you are dungeon crawling . . .” type of vibe. I adore second person, and also it felt the most natural to show the progression of a game in an immersive POV. When playing games myself, I often find myself describing them as “I tried to change my outfit and then FELL OFF A CLIFF AND DIED OH MY GOD” or framing it in second person when discussing with other people.

We still tend to mark the presence of the feminine as unusual, while overlooking the overrepresentation of the masculine. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was once asked when there would be enough women on the Supreme Court, and answered, “When there are nine.” When whole groups of women can fill non-gendered roles without it being noteworthy, we’ll have arrived. So for my Golden Age-style story, I followed the Golden Age tradition of casually using only one gendered pronoun. Only I picked feminine pronouns.

I’ve always found real life totally absurd, and sometimes absurdism is the only way to portray our world accurately. We all train ourselves not to see what’s right in front of us, all the time, because that’s the price of functioning in twenty-first century society, and meanwhile we’re so overloaded with information and opinions that we can easily start believing things that make no sense. A non-absurd approach to storytelling is merely contributing to the problem, in a lot of ways.

This is a trope I think about a lot. The life of those beings always seems to be one of isolation, as if exile is the cost of great power or knowledge. A genie is trapped in a lamp. A mad genius is trapped in their own head. Even if they don’t literally leave society, they can’t help viewing themselves as separate from it. There’s an essential schizophrenia to it. If you viewed yourself as totally apart from literally everyone you met, you’d have to at least seem a bit shady. And if the power has a high cost to begin with, isn’t it natural for the boon to have a cost?

Whatever the reason, the truth is that SF has ignored almost every group of heroes except the white male or female ones, and that’s just unbelievable in a country where more than half the children being born are non-white. SF has to be realistic and reflect the real world; the real America is colourful, transgender, lesbian, Muslim, immigrant and beautifully diverse. You can retire all those white SF heroes now: they can pick up their social welfare checks from the local VA every month and stay home griping about the way it used to be.

Scarecrows are shaped and dressed like humans to fool birds from a distance—but if you get close enough, you see the shape and outerwear are a disguise. You can modify a lot about a scarecrow to make it look more human, but the closer a person gets to it, the less human it appears. I liked the idea of Sister’s husband physically resembling a scarecrow, and trying to acquire the pieces that would make him look human without his disguise—one Marianne is never able to see, but her family responds to favorably, which sets her apart.

I would like to think that if I were a father, I’d be as friendly a presence in my child’s life as this protagonist, but alas, life has not provided the hard evidence. I like to create characters different from myself, but at longer lengths have often given myself a little Hitchcockian cameo at the edge of the action. Closest thing to me in any recent work is the title character in “The Old Horror Writer” at Nightmare Magazine.

My first RPG character was for basic D&D, and he was an elf. Basic didn’t have classes and races as distinct things, so elves were a kind of fighter/wizard combination. I loved that character, and the adventures we had have stuck with me for nearly thirty years. So I’m partial to elves and spellcasters from that experience. The odd spells of D&D have always fascinated me, as well as the names. It’s probably no surprise to any RPG veteran that Briggsby’s name is meant to be a reference to an old-school wizard.

This is where the “strange effect” of fiction is really quite powerful. Being able to sympathize with people completely unlike ourselves helps open our minds to what others in the real world are going through. I try to remember this when I find myself judging people whose ambitions have lead them astray. We have a political and corporate climate right now that makes it easy to lose sympathy for people. There are some folks out there who are reviled by many, and I think it would break our hearts to learn how much some of them loathe themselves.

True fact: when I first read Orwell’s 1984 (back when I was a tiny!Merc and didn’t quite get a lot of the political commentary), I was miffed that things like the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love were not literal. Tiny!Merc was outraged that these names were, in fact, hiding something quite different. When I grew older and eventually got the irony, it really became all that much scarier. Naming something that has connotations of positive concepts when the thing is really fucking terrifying is a mind game all its own.