Daya has completely internalized that colorism and misogyny, and I hope that’s clear to readers! She’s not light-skinned, so from her point of view she must be plain. How she actually looks is beside the point. Similarly, the mercy she represents is coerced—if you don’t question the underlying assumptions, Feminine Virtue (TM) is a girl’s only acceptable alternative to being light-skinned.

I think all fiction is political, in that all fiction argues for a vision of what the world is and how it works and what is good and what is bad. I think that’s basically the essence of politics, competing definitions of the Good and the nature of the human experience. You can write a story with the aim of creating only sensation and aesthetic pleasure in the reader, but even doing that, you must make implicit statements about the world.

High school wasn’t entirely torturous for me (it was certainly better than middle school, anyway) but saying it was some high point in my life or something I miss would also be a considerable stretch. There are differences between B and Teenage Me, of course, and not just the obvious ones like (spoilers!) I never came back from the dead.

I think in this case I’m trying to make the point that environmental degradation ultimately degrades us. If we stop caring, not just about the wholesomeness of our physical environment and the preservation of the natural world, but about the education and quality of life of all levels of our citizens, as a civilization we haven’t a lot to look forward to.

Most of my protagonists are very young, but Oliver’s story strayed into territory that interested me as an adult. Eleven-year-old me would have found the conflict between water and road incredibly frustrating. What can a childhood sense of absolute right and wrong do in the face of an ancient, intractable grudge?

My mom always asks me why I don’t write more nice stories. I don’t think of what I write as particularly dark, but I have always been drawn to black humor, bleak settings, flawed characters, and violent climaxes. Those elements often appear in my work. They keep things entertaining.

Many of my stories (including this one) usually start with me remarking to someone “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if . . . ” Only I don’t know how to write humor, so the hilarious idea (in this case it was “wouldn’t it be funny if instead of helping him save the world, the dragon ate the farm boy?”) usually gets paired with something decidedly unfunny.