The overarching story is that of Kaslo, an immensely competent man in his natural habitat, who has to learn how to cope with a sudden shift to a very dangerous environment in which his skills are not much use. By contrast, there’s also Obron, who was a bit of a ninny in the old universe but who is becoming a genuine power in the new. The theme there is that we are all creatures of our environments,

Gender identity, for many of us, is not binary. It’s pleasantly hazy, or can be pleasant, and should be. It’s slippery. Today there’s a growing consciousness of this inherent fluidity. There are pockets where the words “male” and “female” are obsolete, even offensive. Where L, G, B, T, Q, and Z are beginning to lose their meaning. But these pockets are few and far between

I didn’t want to do a story where magic was a normal part of the world or something available to the protagonists. So I went with the classic “portal world” situation, and this is just the setting that came to me. What struck me on re-reading the story long after it was written is that, despite the fantastical setting, and despite John’s admonition, it feels like a science fiction story.

I’m a freshwater person. Lake Superior is my idea of a wonderful body of water. But I was thinking of where people go to flee a bad political situation, or where they might go. Historically, that’s hills, forests, and the sea — stay tuned for more stories set in the hills and forests of this world.Also, I like cephalopods. They’re neat. Any time there’s room for cephalopods, I say they hardly ever make a story worse.

I sort of pictured the narrator as a bit of an extension of the wet gentleman himself. He gets some satisfaction from the fear, uncertainty, and suffering of the characters in his story, and the wet gentleman’s victory is his victory. All that bonhomie is part of his shtick. He’s the kind to get you to buy him a drink in a way that makes you think he’s doing you a favor.

I have two themes that I seem to return to over and over. One is characters with good intentions who somehow find themselves having created a horrible mess and who are now seen as villains or monsters. The other is the idea that reality is not what we perceive it to be, that one day we’ll suddenly find that impossible things are happening to us, because we were ignorant of the bigger picture. Many of my favorite stories deal with that idea of upending reality.

This was one of those very rare and very blessed cases of a story coming out in one writing session of less than two hours, though I gave it a second pass one day later; the deadline for the anthology in question was imminent, and I began composition knowing what I wanted the story to be like.

I find psychology fascinating. How do people process sensory information? How do we react to adversity, or to opportunity? Which aspects of our lives are most important to our identity?

I write a lot about love, of course, and it’s always about how damn complicated it is, whether between the parties in love, or between them and the world. I’m particularly interested in love between flawed equals. The main character in this story is hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old, and she’s been alone for much of that time, never meeting her match. The story was an exploration of that theme, the possibility of constricting oneself to loneliness for too long, and then being wrested from it by impossible love.

Art can change the world, though we can’t count on that as much as we would like it to. Still, that moment when you hear a song that speaks to you, or lose yourself in a book, or laugh out loud at a movie — what’s better than that? It’s worth working hard in order to create those moments for people.