I experienced a lot of that bullying you mention when I was young. I was someone who was perceived as a weird, feminine boy, and in the 1980s and early 1990s that was a very hard thing to be. There are many stories out there about LGBTQ people dealing with this awful, crushing weight of difference and exclusion and violence. I think, though, that it’s important to have stories that are not dark and brutal.

Exploring otherness is, I think, the essential work of the fiction writer. We develop our skills by sitting on the outside edges and observing; we create people on the page who are not (to the extent that we can help it) ourselves. The better we are at creating not-us on the page, the better people think we are at writing fiction. This is all very lovely and twisty, because of course, we can’t write anything but ourselves.

I have trouble with commas. I know, I know, but it’s true! I tend to view punctuation as a way to pace and space a sentence: When I put a comma in, it’s because I want the reader to take a breath before plunging onward. It’s almost like writing very long structured poetry. When I’m working in first person, I can get away with it, to a degree, but when I move to third, or even second, it can get awkward.

I’ve written a few Heaven and/or Hell stories over the years, including my first published horror story, “Clearance to Land,” and the Johnny Cash tribute “The Train Stops.” One of my many novels in progress is yet another visit to the inferno, which you may or may not see completed at some point. (I am not currently working on it, so don’t hold your breath; just saying that I’m not quite done with the questions.) Many folks attack the trope at one time or another, whether they’re believers or not.

sensory details come to me pretty organically when I’m writing first drafts. If I don’t feel grounded enough in the world to access that sort of thing mostly unconsciously, the story is probably not “baked” enough for me to start writing it. As a reader, I also totally live for these moments. I think they’re almost like cheat codes. If a writer can tell me super precisely about a sensation I’m familiar with, I’m much more likely to believe them.

What becomes “the love of your life” depends on individual character. I have a lawyer uncle for whom the law has been the great love of his love. It could be a person, a concept (God or country or duty), a goal like power, or even something frivolous like chess. Your greatest love, no matter what you say, is whatever you award the bulk of your energy, time, thought, and feeling. It is what you will sacrifice for.

The western as a genre has a rich and deep body of tropes to draw upon. That richness and depth does so much work for the writer—the scenery’s already in the reader’s mind, the sets, the atmosphere, the costumes. A reader brings all of that into the story with her, and that translates to, as you said, expectation. As the storyteller, I benefit from that immensely.

I’m an anxious person, and like most anxious people, I often spin through a hundred different “But what if I had just done this instead?” possibilities when I screw up. Sarah’s machine is a literal version of that. She has to run through all the possibilities before she can confront the idea that she has this one world. As Dahlia points out, their daughter is missing and possibly in trouble, and Sarah’s locked away in the basement.

Some of the kindest and most sensitive ER staff I know are people who look really physically intimidating; they’ve developed such good people skills because they realize they can scare patients just by walking into a room. Tiny women in marginalized jobs need to be tremendously strong to survive that experience. That’s true, really, of anyone at the bottom of any pecking order.

The story developed out of a non-literary project: I was invited to give a talk at an academic conference at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, in 2001. The conference was on Human Origins, especially the development of sentience, and I was invited to address the idea of non-human intelligence. Scarcely having gone to college myself, I was intimidated by the eminences in paleontology and linguistics elsewhere on the program.