I think that as I’ve developed as a writer, I’ve gained three main tools. The first is faith that I’m eventually going to get to the end, because I usually do, even if I have no idea how and it really doesn’t look like I will. The second is perseverance (rejections, blah blah). The third is actually knowing when to give up on something. I think that’s the real paradox of being a writer—you have to have so much blind faith and perseverance…

I had generated a flash piece based on the title, which was the list of tourist brochure entries that made it more or less intact, albeit totally reordered, into the final story. I realized that, although that list tells a story of its own, it isn’t one with the emotional impact I wanted, which led me to go back and imagine what kind of person might read such a brochure and visit these places. Once I had Mer in mind, I wrote his scenes out of order.

I wrote this story at Clarion West, where one of our instructors was the Australian editor Jonathan Strahan. I’d grown up in Australia, so I got it in my head that I’d write an Australia story for him. I’d also been tempted to have a go at a classic space survival kind of plot, and the two ideas fused when I hit on the parallel between central Australia and Mars—two red, arid landscapes that, to an outsider, don’t seem capable of supporting life. That image was really important at the beginning.

I’m a knitter. I’m not a great knitter, I’ve never knitted a full-on sweater. But I like knitting, and I love the idea of knitting as code. That there’s something cosmic about it if you can really tap into that code. I mashed that idea into the angel idea, which was inspired by another piece of fiction I read recently, and spun it all out from there. Oh, I also spin wool. I think we can always use more stories about fiber arts.

I got the concept for this story from a picture I saw online. It was this giant head suspended in front of an altar. I actually don’t remember it that well because everytime I look at it I think, that’s not how I remember it! But when I saw it I thought, wow, that’s a really terrible way to honor a god and the story of Sri spun from there. The way the story is told is inspired by the oral tradition of storytelling.