top nattering around the edges and reading every single “advice on writing” book or essay you come across—I am convinced that this is a pernicious form of writer’s block and the only way to avoid it is to hold your nose and jump in. Remember that if your first drafts stink, that’s a good thing: It means you have something to work with in subsequent drafts, which is where the real writing happens.

One way I deal with fear is to write about it, or try to imagine it. I’m comically afraid of blood, for instance, so the idea of fetishizing it makes my stomach do a flip—that’s why I wrote a story in grad school about someone who does. Trying to write about an act like this is a way of staring directly into that fear.

The pain that is called “phantom limb” is caused by the loss of a major part of someone’s body; it consists of physical pain in the illusory presence of a body part that is gone. The emotional pain that my protagonist feels when he thinks of the people he loved that he’s lost—his mother, his brother, his daughter—is analogous. He’s not remembering the good times with any of those people, only the pain of the loss of what was.

NuTay believes that “dunyshar had no planet, no cultures to imitate, no people”—but I wonder, did you have any specific origin of the dunyshar in mind? I didn’t have anything too specific in mind beyond what’s offered in the story (that offworld humans help sustain their population by becoming surrogates and donating babies to the Port, […]

The plot assumes, of course, that most people are inherently vicious; whether or not that qualifies as insanity depends on your definition of sanity.

This is what I tell every aspiring writer: It should be more important to you to be good than to be published. If you stick with it long enough and don’t grow discouraged or bitter, you will become a better writer. And a writer who is true to herself is more likely to enjoy regular publication, anyway.

You don’t forget people who tried to kill, enslave, wipe out your ancestors! You don’t let them erase you from history. You write over them. Write stories that reinstate your people into those missing pages from history. You write SF stories, Western stories, that postulate a world where Indian means what it really ought to mean, a person from India, not an indigenous First Nation person who was mistakenly called Indian by a stupid, vicious European.

An animal can be brutal; there’s no moral judgment to the concept. It takes a thinking creature to be cruel.

my dad is a steam train enthusiast, so I grew up in an atmosphere of love for a bygone age and its technology. But I think mainly it was Turner’s painting of the Fighting Temeraire, the old warship from the Battle of Trafalgar being tugged off to be broken up. I was thinking about nostalgia and the pain of losing familiar things. But I was also thinking about the way the past survives in artifacts and ideas. The ship survives in the painting and in photographs of the painting.

Writing about, and thinking about, superhero media has made me very sensitive to the underlying levels of hypocrisy in a lot of the Marvel/DC runs—like, take the Daredevil series on Netflix. Daredevil is all “but I don’t kill people zomg!” while, you know, throwing enemies into walls and off stairwells and generally inflicting massive head trauma on so. many. people. Physical violence leaves damages; when I see the “heroes” reacting hyperviolently and then claiming they are doing good, it bothers me.