This one started pretty much with the opening scene: What if you got caught up in a bank heist, and the masked supervillain behind it turned out to be an ex-boyfriend, whom you recognize despite the mask? As with most good superhero stories, the situation—running into an old ex—is emotionally familiar, but amplified. I find this kind of story intriguing and a lot of fun.

Memories are stories that we tell ourselves, and it is stories that shape who we are, who we want to be, and how we truly see ourselves. They nourish us, and they explain us. The protagonist tells us who she was, and in doing so, she gives herself a little bit of immortality as long as we remember her. The dragon put itself into its hoard, and now she remembers it. Our memories are a flimsy insurance against a rush of time that we can never, ever stop, or indeed see to the end.

When characters leave things unsaid, and the reader is able to sense the inner conflicts, it creates tension that can add to the story. In couple relationships, the intensity of feelings can often be unbalanced, with one more devoted than the other. This balance is often in flux, shifting over time or in response to life events. It is something I like to explore in my fiction.

It was the third week of Clarion and our instructor said he would like to see me write something more personal, something that “bled” for me. So I sat down and asked myself, “What scares me? What’s personal?” My mother is schizophrenic, and could not take care of herself, much less children. I remembered trying to explain what it was like growing up with her by saying it was like having a large, malfunctioning machine, one that could harm you at any moment and that you could not turn off.

I drew on residential schools, both in Australia and in Canada (for Aboriginals and First Nations), as a model for the institution where Catherine and Johanna are educated—I knew about their existence, but had naïvely assumed they were further in the past than that, and found out this was very much not the case. The way in which the Galactic and Dai Viet rub against each other (and profoundly misunderstand one another) was drawn from real-life interactions in colonial Indochina.

There’s only one other story about Rand-later-Tybalt that’s currently available; that’s “Forbid the Sea,” which can be downloaded from my website. And of course, Tybalt himself is the romantic lead in my urban fantasy series, so it’s not like there’s a dearth of him around. As to why I wanted to tell the story I told . . . there are two hollow victories here, one over the King, his father, and one over the plague. I wanted to contrast them. I think I did okay.

We know now that there are biological viruses and bacteria that, for their own benefit, alter the behavior of their host organism. So what would get a brain program propagated? What kinds of effects on behavior might make it likely to be spread among host brains? The odd title also comes from biology. Some speculate that sex evolved as a way to slow parasitism. This is called the Red Queen strategy. So with that ringing in my mind, I named the parasite code RedKing.