Grass is ordinary and relentless, like the domination of the family and the rules of everyday life. It ties things (and princesses) down, with countless tiny, tough threads, a mass of them, almost impossible to sever, and even if you break free, these tiny threads leave scars.

The unreliable narrator, for me, tied into the idea of being a teenager on summer break, and everyone always asking what you did during those weeks. Would anyone ever believe you if you had a fantastic adventure—would you believe you, or was it just something you made up to pass the time while you mourned your aunt in your endless summer backyard?

when I decided I wanted to do a story centering around a phoenix, I started to patch a lot of different phoenix myths together. But my favourite is the most common one. The medieval phoenix, resembling a predatory bird, that dies and is reborn again from its ashes. I guess I’ve Harry Potter to thank for that.

I started “Morning Child,” then an untitled fragment, about ten years before I finished it. I wrote a few pages, then lost steam on the story and put it away in a file drawer. Ten years later, I was going through old files, happened to pick up the fragment and looked at it, and suddenly saw how I could finish it. A couple of days later, I had.

“State Change” was written back when I was a published finalist with the Writers of the Future Contest. For the workshop with Tim Powers and K.D. Wentworth, we had to write a complete short story in twenty-four hours, and Tim started by walking around the room, designating random objects as prompts for each of us. When Tim stopped by my seat, he saw a half-finished glass of soda and the melting ice cubes inside, and so he picked one out and told me that was my story.

I actually set out to write a cyberpunk story, when I sat down to write this. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I set out to write a story that would appeal to the sensibilities of a friend, who happens to enjoy cyberpunk stories, among other things.