The entire story also started with another image (years back—I’m a slow writer!): the opening image of the trees that were constantly dropping their leaves in the perpetual autumn of this planet, creating huge piles of dead leaves that never disappear. It’s an image that I find both beautiful and chilling, and that is the tone I hoped to set for the story.

I think I was surprised by how quickly I came to love this lady I had invented. When we think about these kinds of societies, be it Stalinist Russia or North Korea, they are abstractions, with comic book villains at the helm and huddled faceless masses suffering in obscurity. But of course the people that live in these states are real people, living real lives, trying to find joy, like everyone. So although this idea really was kind of a joke, a bit, for it to work Janet had to be real, to be human and honest in her enthusiasms and her fears. So I fell in love with her, as we do with all of our protagonists.

I read about an invasion and siege in 1551, when ships from the Ottoman Empire attacked the island of Gozo and carried away some five or six thousand people, leaving only a tiny number of the island inhabitants behind. I immediately started wondering about those few people left behind, about what you can do when invaders steal away everybody you know, about what’s left when you’re the one who gets away. This story is not a fictionalized version of that event or a metaphor for that event in any way.

I was thinking about the spaces that characters and advertising mascots occupy in our dreams. They’re recurring figures alongside our friends and relatives. I don’t believe that we’ve lost something or whatever because Luke Skywalker shows up instead of a Jungian hermit. That’s what happens when we tell stories in visual media (and when certain companies figure out the best way to your wallet is through your imagination). But I think it’s easy for our brains to grab these characters and mascots and throw them in the mix as a mentor or an enemy.