The process that works best for me is to think of an interesting character and start the story when they are in trouble. Then give them a difficult decision to make. Readers have such different reactions, but for most people, characters are the key to a story. If the reader doesn’t care about the characters, it’s that much harder to interest them in the conflict. It helps to make the story more memorable if a reader can identify with the choices the character faces.

As a kid, I always loved collecting different versions of the same stories. Considering all the retellings I write, I guess I never got over it. We had VHS copies of various productions of Alice in Wonderland, which I’d watch over and over.

This is a story about desolation. About emptiness. And the way to highlight that is to make every little sound and every nagging thought as loud as thunder. Absolute silence isn’t that interesting; anyone can plug their ears. What’s interesting is a world where your full senses are alert, but there is very little there to tickle them. It’s also the challenge as a writer to make a very constrained set come alive. You don’t have weather and traffic and wildlife to paint your world with. This means highlighting what little you do have.

We talk about happy endings and tragic endings and such, but the fact is that stories don’t really end, short of the heat death of the universe. There’s always something that comes next, if there’s anyone left standing. I’ll write more about those characters or that world if the stories show themselves, but as often as not it’s best left to the reader’s imagination.

I’m not sure when I consciously realized the theme that seemed to run through shows or movies about destroying the robots/androids, or how they were an antagonistic force that had to be defeated. It always made me sad or frustrated. The way robots and androids and cyborgs can appear so very human, yet be different, or at least seen as different by the human characters, well . . . that clicked for me on a fundamental level.

In recent years there’s been a lot of good conversation about representation in adventure fantasy. One of my favorite critiques has been a response to people who claim erroneously that the presence of nonwhites and combatant women in medieval Europe isn’t “plausible.”

I wanted this story to have a very accessible point of view character—someone we could recognize and empathize with whether they were male, female, or other. Choosing the right narrator—and right distance from that narrator, whether it’s first person, third person, close third person, or omniscient—changes the overall emotional effect of the story, so I think that’s key.