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?