I wasn’t meaning to write horror with this one, but every time I try to go fantasy or science fiction or western or literary or crime, the blood always seems to bubble up into something . . . maybe horrific? Horror-adjacent? The beats and techniques of horror are what I know best, I guess, so they’re the scaffolding for most everything I do. You tell the story that feels true to you, and for me that’s horror.

I include some humor in most of my writing. The guy in the back of my head who does the actual creating seems to have a natural sense of how much to use and when to use it. I don’t argue with him because he’s almost always right.

I was riding the city bus, late at night, and I saw a bus stop ad for something I can no longer remember—it wasn’t a good ad—the ad’s mascot was a smiling GPS pin. You know the location pin in Google Maps: a red circle that tapers into a long tail? That, with a smiley face. I remember being revolted. Why does everything need a face? I thought of other ads that personify unlikely things by tacking on a smile—most horrifyingly, the kiwi fruit whose smile is carved from his skin.

I love the Alice books, as well as Carroll’s other work, but like a lot of readers and scholars, I’ve wondered about what actually happened between him and the Liddell family, particularly Alice—and I’ve wondered what it would have been like to be Alice, famous for being the heroine of Carroll’s book. She had a life, by the way—a very rich life apart from being a literary character. But to us, she will always be Alice in Wonderland.

I spent a large chunk of my childhood in Gainesville, Florida, where the local fauna are as much a part of your property as the front door. We had gators in our yard after it rained, an armadillo living under the porch, and a long pile of rocks against one side of the house that sheltered a huge snake. Every so often, we’d find one of its shed skins wedged between the rocks.

Refractin, the cosmetic procedure, was born of a few of my obsessions pooling together—modern art, Vantablack, body modification, and the act of reading people’s nonverbal communication. Oh, and the one illustration of the Terrible Trivium from The Phantom Tollbooth, which scared me so much as a kid I had to skip that chapter.

“Super-Luminous Spiral” started with a question: Why do so many literary short stories center on cheating? Instead of trying to find the truth, I decided to make my own answer through a very bisexual speculative story. Hopefully, that story seed grew into something more interesting and complex than a jab at literature’s cheating obsession . . . Also, I’m pretty sure now that I’ve written this, I’m condemned to only writing about cheating from here on out.

“The Horror of Party Beach” is part of a longer series of stories I’ve been doing, in which I borrow the titles of cheesy SF/horror movies from the 1950s (and in this case the ’60s), and use them as the inspiration for a new piece. The original intent was to write emotionally serious stories around these ridiculous titles—to take the situations they suggested and treat them with the seriousness a mainstream literary writer might bring to his or her material.

This interview is apparently a course in writer-brain and the way writer brains transform entire histories into fiction! The lemon elements here came originally from a lemonade stand in Idaho, one that, when I was a teenager, was a huge draw, because of the girl who worked at it. The stand was lemon-shaped, and the girl was gorgeous, dressed in lemon yellow, and had lemon yellow hair. She somehow managed to be both voluptuously innocent and palpably good, and also, you know, a living lemon.

I have long used as a story generation tool the personal premise of “secret sequels,” tales that take place in the worlds of various stories by others, all important to me, but not belonging to me. I use the original as jumping-off point, then file off the serial numbers, secure that what I’ve brought to the canvas is sufficient to justify the tale as entirely mine, without being slavish carbon copy. It is a function of asking the question, “What would happen next?”