I definitely didn’t want to write anything tragic. I think in our world we always know that tragedy is right around the corner and always a possibility, and so it looms over Jamie like it looms over us all. But there are enough tragedies about transgender kids and adults, both in fiction and in reality. This didn’t need to be another one.

 I had the essential image, a metropolis as amoeba, extending pseudopods to locomote across a landscape, while sucking up people to function as its citizenry. I have absolutely no memory of this image entering my head, but everything else in the story proceeded from that genesis.

The story was written in the summer, when the Florida heat tends to keep me fairly housebound, so the desire to escape the house for a bit seems to have crept in there. And of course, when I was a kid, I was always hoping that the next time I opened up a wardrobe door, I would be able to see Narnia. It never happened—and alas, the walls of my current closet seem all too solid—but I suppose I’ve never really given up that hope.

When I’m writing I’m looking for characters that are different from me, but also familiar. I can see their motivations. I understand why they are doing the things they do. I connect with Henrietta through many of the matriarchs I’ve loved in my life. These women have guided me as a human being. My two grandmothers remind me a lot of Henrietta, and so it was important for me to tell a story that treats her as she should be treated: complex and deeply sympathetic.

 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.