To me, hope isn’t so much a talisman against sorrow as its dual expression—it’s what gets us through sorrow, but also what sharpens it and makes it almost unbearable, very much a double-edged sword. The idea of opposite things giving meaning to each other is definitely something I try to explore in my work. My novel The House of Shattered Wings is about finding beauty and hope (but also sorrow) in the ruins of a Paris devastated by a magical war.

Someone had to be the interviewer, so I figured, why not me? I love cameos, such as Vonnegut walking into his novels or, more prominently, Rob Reiner directing and playing the director in Spinal Tap. It certainly made things less complicated. I’m glad you didn’t notice story-me, though, because an interviewer should be invisible, like the never-named reporter in Citizen Kane.

A large inspiration for the story was the comic book Scott Pilgrim. I’d been wanting to try something similar, taking video game elements and projecting them onto the real world, but perhaps with tabletop RPG elements as well. As kids, we often talked about how great it would be if we could transport ourselves into a fantasy world to be our characters. It only took me thirty-plus years to get around to writing a story about what that might be like.

My feminist interests have moved since the days of writing that story from the binary, the story of men and women, into something more complicated and more accurately reflective of the many gender and sexual possibilities and histories. But I do think, with the Clinton campaign fully underway, we are already seeing a return to that simple old-fashioned misogyny.

I usually like to invert genre expectations, or at least to put a different spin on them. Since, as you mentioned, hauntings are often about what lingers, I wanted the haunting effect to be about what’s lost irrevocably, which can haunt in a different way. The strong absence of someone or something can sometimes be felt as if it’s a presence.

Drastic legislative initiatives like SOPA/PIPA (and the vast scope of the backlash against those), governmental and corporate ambivalence about whistleblowers, social movements from Anonymous to Occupy, Twitter-powered revolutions, the explosion of FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) resources and communities, hackerspaces, the claiming and reclaiming of the word “hacker”. . . all of these paint a world much different from the one I grew up in.

The thing about Clarion is that it’s also confirmed for me that I do a lot better with people around me and also that I am not an ogre. It’s also been good to get some solid instruction on how to streamline stories—specifically genre stories. I did a creative writing minor in undergrad; I was not a good note-taker, and also the expectations were more literary when I was clearly a genre nerd.

The intersection between the scientific and the unexplained is a theme to which I’ve frequently returned, mostly because it’s a wonderful idea engine, especially if you’re trying to write mysteries. Part of this is due to my longtime love for The X-Files, and many of my stories can be described as puzzles in which Scully’s worldview, rather than Mulder’s, is ultimately proven right.

I was also thinking of a great line from a Utah Phillips bit: “Make a break for it, kids. Flee into the wilderness. The one within, if you can find it.” The combination of that line and the thought of a volcano that no one noticed coalesced nicely. The sex part is there because, I dunno, sex is pretty interesting? Like most people, I think about it a bunch.

The thing I really hoped for with this story was to convey the emotional life of a person who might engage in a loving relationship with multiple versions of themselves, the efforts they might go to in order to preserve that relationship, and the personal cost of it all going horribly wrong. Which seemed likely to me. Relationships are fragile enough even between two very similar people.