The story grew out of reflections on how much of life for many people is spent in the fantasy worlds created by movies, books, games, or their own imagination—and also how many occupations now are carried out at a remove from the real world. Saying “the real world” seems wrong—what is reality if we’re not in it?

I am an autumn girl, a Halloween girl, a bonfires and cornfields pumpkin patch trick-or-treat girl. Given the chance, I’ll open everything in October. More than that, I adore harvest stories. I think the harvest is one of the most powerful liminal ideas of the American psyche, and since I wanted this to be a very Americana story, I wanted that power.

I care passionately about language—but not altogether, I hope, at the expense of story. It’s absolutely true that I’m very particular about the stylistic aspects of a story, and while I find the wordsmith/storyteller comparison interesting and probably true, there’s another I’d like to cite alongside it. Unfortunately I forget who said it, but according to an article I once read, all writers are either “Dickensian” or “Nabokovian.” The Dickensian writer’s central concern is with life in the round, the vast panoply of existence, the “God’s eye view,” if you like, whereas the Nabokovian’s focus is narrower, more internal, obsessed with detail and with the subject of obsession itself.

Grief is a powerful emotion. It can drive people to do any number of things they might not ordinarily do. […] But our past is what makes us who we are; we are that collection of experiences and relationships, and by denying his past, Sam is left only with senseless fighting and dying around him to identify who he is. That’s not a great place to be.

[The story] is set in a world where matter transmitters are taken for granted by most people, at least by the youngest members of society, who have entirely grown up with them. This technology, d-mat, doesn’t use a wormhole or anything like that: It analyses a thing, destroying it in the process, and then creates an identical copy somewhere else.

My passion is fairy tales and how they adapt across cultures and time, so I was sort of fascinated by how I could work them into an urban, very non-European, very modern Australian setting.

I think the whole secret of happiness, in this or in any other society, is to be deeply and genuinely interested. In anything: politics, your children, your job, soccer, quilting, collecting beer steins—it doesn’t matter. “Hobbies” is an inadequate word for what I’m talking about. The point is that when you are sincerely engaged with something, you have a reason to get out of bed in the morning with some degree of pleasure.

I started with the title and the premises of written magic and a sunken, haunted ship.

I had quite a bit of fun with imagining the backstory of Morbid Management—the idea being that a dinosaur-based rock act would only be the latest in a string of epically tasteless ideas that have all gone wrong in one way or another. Oddly, though, once I started thinking about robot cover bands, I wondered why someone hadn’t already done it in real life. And then (long after the story) I found out about Compressorhead, the all-robot Motorhead cover act! They sound like fun.

Late Imperial China never developed an independent legal profession as we understand the term in the West. But the complex social and economic life during the Qing Dynasty created demand for individuals with litigation expertise. And so the songshi (“litigation masters”) were born.