I want three things out of a story, whether I’m writing it or reading it: an interesting character, an unusual situation, and a strong, distinctive voice. I’m tempted to add “atmosphere” to that list, although it’s a pretty nebulous concept. Basically, I want to either experience something I’ve never experienced before, or to look at a familiar experience in a new way. The best thing about speculative fiction is that it lets you do both at once.

The SCA fed my creative processes to the point of medical danger, but not in the way you might think. It actually filled in a huge number of small gaps in my background knowledge: what it was like to be a medieval leader, how hard it is to get into armour without help, the relationship between romance and fighting, how easy it is to ignore injuries during a tournament, toleration for wildlife in the food, and the use of grass as toilet paper.

This story was from an idea that I had as a teenager, and tried (and failed) to write as a teenager. I have always wondered if this world is someone’s dream. And if so, who? And what happens to the rest of us when that person gets hurt or dies? Now I’m an adult, and I have realized that my memory isn’t perfect. A lot of the fear of forgetting my life also went into this story.

My oldest son was assigned Edith Hamilton’s MYTHOLOGY to read over the summer. I remember when I first discovered that book back in fifth grade and it was transformative for me. It helped stoke my love of stories. In fact, I so couldn’t get enough of the myths, I often got in trouble from my teachers because I would end up reading them rather than pay attention in class.

When I wrote this story I was playing around with a technique where I take several flash stories and combine them into one longer piece. I thought it’d be fun to write a flash story for each of the seven wonders of the world, with future wonders instead of ancient wonders. To link all the stories together, my initial plan was to have one character visit all seven wonders, and I came up with Mei.

There’s an estimated eighteen million empty homes in this country — and an estimated three million homeless households. (That means every homeless family could have six homes!) Because property rights trump human rights in this country — they always have, going back to when human beings were property. But the banks aren’t dumb, and they’ll put a lot of resources into keeping their buildings in good shape — I just started thinking about what that would look like in a more magical world.

I hoped people would see that despite the way humanity repeats the same damn mistakes over and over . . . we do make progress. A little, even when it seems hopeless. And that the best way to handle the utter chaos of the bigger world around us is to remember to love and connect to each other. Those deep connections are intensely meaningful.

The story isn’t literal truth — it’s a fantastical quest inspired by the feel of New Orleans and my memories of Mardi Gras. When writing semi­autobiographical fiction, I tell students, there’s a point where you change everyone’s names, appearances, and styles of dress, and they start to behave in ways that are divergent from the people who inspired them, and have undreamed of adventures.

I’ve always had vivid and strange dreams that don’t map well to interpretation. I’m interested in the idea that dreams are the brain’s way of working out something that is going on in the present by applying past experiences. That makes more sense to me than the idea that a dream of a wind-up toy monster spitting sparks across a backdrop of Georgia O’Keeffe skyscrapers would somehow mean the same thing to everyone.

The relationships between women in folklore seem sadly mapped over the myth of exceptionalism we see so often today — one woman’s the fairest or the kindest, and the others are wicked and cruel. You see so many news stories about how a woman is “the next X” (a replacement for that one elusive position) or a headline with a “vs.” in it, like just having two women existing at the same time means they’re in a standoff.