Language doesn’t come to me. I choose it, carefully, to reflect the kind of story I’m writing. I went to a very old-fashioned school, back in the day, where we were taught to write by copying models of classical prose. Somewhere in my papers are my Addison and Steele essay, my Francis Bacon essay, my A.A. Milne story, my E.R. Edison story, and others I have thankfully forgotten.

I am absolutely a people watcher, and one of the best places to do it is open-air markets. I find that crowds make people a bit grumpy, unless the crowd has gathered around food. Then the celebratory atmosphere overwhelms the anxiety of being pressed in shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers. You don’t see a lot of frowning people at an open-air market unless the food’s run out.

Almost every subgenre exists in two forms: the purest one, which is just one stage removed from real life, and the one based on prior iterations that is just love for the genre, feeding back on itself. Thus, we have crime fiction that really is based on the culture of illegality and human corruption, and crime fiction that just boils the tropes.

The ways that various cultures define civilization and humanity have always interested me. What if, for these people, the definition of civilization was people who could commit terrible atrocities? What if they believed that goading a people into destroying itself was actually helping them become more civilized? Looking out at the history of colonialism here in the U.S., that definition isn’t that far from the mindset of many European colonizers. 



it’s the lack of humanity in the human psyche that haunts me. The hypocrisy. How people as a group can take something like tolerance and contort it into a new form of intolerance and conformity. The way humanity can justify any kind of evil. But what I like to believe, and what I do firmly hold to, is that in us all we do have the ability to remain honorable, no matter what has been done to us.

Ava’s ADD is a side effect of a completely science fictional condition: her acute empathy for the feelings of animals, which surpasses anything I’ve ever seen in real life—and that natural ability is then amplified through the use of surgically implanted nanites. That being said, I did do research on a number of topics to help lend an air of credibility to Ava’s condition and symptoms.

I liked being Conan. You get a kind of rush, a heady feeling of power from being the guy. Every problem can be solved by a sword stroke and a mug of ale. Yet at the same time, I recognized that Conan was “that guy” in the locker room—the one who “never lost a fight” and “bagged a chick last weekend.” You have these constant moments, as a sixteen-year-old boy, wondering, “Is that manhood?”

I wanted to tell the story of two high school girls who meet at a summer camp and become collaborators on their science projects, and, by nature of their collaboration, their relationship develops and deepens in way that neither of them expects. Furthermore, I wanted their collaboration to be antithetical to the competitive spirit of the science fair at the end of camp. It is my hope that, in this way, readers understand that Fox and Scully’s relationship defies expectations due, in part, to the expectations placed upon them.

Principles and rules of writing are useful—essential—for beginners; they help you recognize the dynamics of what you’re doing, to analyze problems and see patterns. They provide a vocabulary and even a technology for composition. But once you get to a certain level, you need to treat them as tools and devices, not as commandments. You have to know when to jettison a rule that you would otherwise use 90% of the time.