Growing up in Malaysia, really, and listening to the usual doctrine. The wife is an asset, an advantageous acquisition for the husband’s family. She has to be. Because otherwise, what’s the point of her? There’s definitely a growing awareness of women’s rights in the country, but a lot of the older generation still subscribe to the idea that women are almost property. And you do see its impact on men of my generation

 I’m fascinated by stage magic. There’s definitely a similarity between stage magic and fiction, not just in the reliance on the audience to suspend disbelief, but also in the power of misdirection. Writers choose what readers see, and when they see it. What’s background or set, what detail will be important to the story? We control the timing of what is revealed when, and if we do it right, we reward the careful reader. Style is just one of the tools.

 Humans can obviously be connected to the environment and/or incredibly destructive towards it. But even if humans stop existing, if we wipe ourselves out, are driven to extinction, or just up stakes and leave, the environment will go on. It doesn’t need us nearly as much as we need it. I wrote this story in response to my own fears of nuclear war, which are a primal thing for me. I grew up in the 1980s when the possibility of a nuclear exchange with the USSR was still quite real, so that has lurked in my own psyche for many, many years.

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.