I love fairy tales and folk tales. I particularly love seeing how they intersect. Go back far enough, and you begin to see how multiple versions of a story spread over time, like tributaries flowing out of a single source. Some fairy tales are thousands of years old. We tell and re-tell them. Languages split from their roots and evolve. Wolves become bears become tigers. The monkey wife becomes a dog bride becomes a mouse maiden. Stories don’t stay the same, and they don’t just entertain and instruct.

It’s so interesting to me that you see that link to Mnemosyne in the story, and I love that you do. I often draw on myth in my work, but this time, I didn’t—at least not consciously. My conscious inspiration was the word “lachrymist” itself. It crossed my path on Twitter as an entry on unusual words (I love words and I follow multiple dictionaries). I was so taken with the definition that I decided to see if I could write a story about a lachrymist.

I played Everquest—a first-generation MMORPG—for a few years when I was in middle school and high school. And over the course of that time the game declined and became virtually empty, so that it started to feel like the few remaining players were the survivors of some apocalypse. Needless to say, I always played female characters, and I always maintained the illusion rigorously.