I planned to write a creepy story about a creature that interfered with people’s dreams by sticking fingers in their ears and doing something . . . creepy. It was vague. When I sat down to write the story, my brain informed me that I was instead going to impersonate Cat Valente and prove to the world that good things come of watching too much VH1 when you’re in high school. My brain is very opinionated and very hostile, so I don’t usually argue with it.

It’s a common narrative assumption that humans will one day obtain alien technology, either by discovering it in space, or capturing it in a war. Then, we’ll find a way to deploy that technology to our advantage, possibly with unforeseen consequences. But such an idea seems awfully presumptuous. It assumes that aliens are so nearly like us, and so close to us in their arc of technological development, that their tools would represent only a small intuitive leap.

I was trying to compare [an] aspect of the city’s past with its present day position as a city that has devoted itself to education, medicine, and green industries—the exact opposite of what it used to be. I knew I wanted to write a story that explored those differences, and wanted to write a story, too, that would have a character bound up with both the wreckage of the city’s past and the more privileged life of the present day.

Years ago I woke up from a dream in which I had suddenly remembered that I’d killed somebody—although I couldn’t remember why, or how I’d managed to get away with it. […] And then I had to ask myself how a dream-murder could affect anyone except the person who dreamed it.

For me, words just come on their own, in a torrent, in a flood. I imagine what the character feels and their words come without my forcing them too much, just a little. The words and their meanings (deep meanings, not the ones in the dictionary) are fused in a single outpouring.

I chose to rewrite “Cinderella” because I was a shy, plain girl who detested and envied the Cinderellas of the world. I wanted to blow their founding myth to smithereens.

I’ve got a document loaded with tiny snippets of text and images, titled “idearrhea” because I created it two years ago when I was young and immature, and it was while scrolling through it this October that I rediscovered: “Insomniac society, cosmetic viruses, wet street, fast awake.” That fragment then became “Let’s Take This Viral” over the course of a weekend.

I had a nightmare that I was hired to tighten bolts on a strange moat, and I had to contend with a spiny octopus that lived near my floating desk. The dream stuck with me, so […] I shaped it into a story.

“Three Days” started with the image of an island city left standing above a waterless lakebed, stranded by drought. I expected it to be a bleak story, but discovered that I found the setting remarkably beautiful. My own response to it is like that slightly painful yearning of nostalgia for a place or a time that never was.

Lily is the protagonist in a fairy tale when she arrives. She has a problem—her own dissatisfaction with her life—and so she goes on a journey, a sort of quest. She arrives at a magical place and meets the people who are to help her along the way.