How did this story originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

“The Boy Who Ran from His Faerie Heart” had two unlikely inspirations. The initial flashpoint was a random image that popped into my head of a boy riding a giant, lumbering tortoise into the woods. I let that percolate in the back of my mind for a while, and it somehow combined with inspiration from one of my favorite episodes of Doctor Who—a mini-episode called “Night of the Doctor,” in which the eighth Doctor is offered a choice of potions to guide his next regeneration. Of course, the Doctor resists at first, as does Sheridan.

To me, it’s less about choosing among possibilities, and more about embracing the truth of yourself. It’s that moment when you glimpse your potential and realize you are not who your parents want you to be, not what your friends think is cool, not a dream-fulfilling proxy for your coach or teacher. There comes a moment when you want to shed all those expectations and attempts to define you, even though those can feel surprisingly safe. Sheridan runs from this moment only because it was thrust upon him by necessity before he was ready. He hadn’t had time to figure himself out on his own yet. Fortunately, he’s granted that space, without pressure. When he is ready, he’s allowed to pick up right where he left off without repercussion.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

I feel like I got stuck at every point. A lot of what I do to get unstuck is about lowering the stakes. I usually write a short story straight through, start to finish. But this one, I could only catch it in pieces, and not in order.

To take pressure off myself, not just with this story, but with writing in general, I decided to set up a completely different writing app just for developing ideas. I used a free plain-text note app that would only be used to capture and develop initial thoughts. It helped to remove the feel of working on a finished story. I called it my “Fiction Laboratory” and I labeled each note “Experiment xxxxx” and gave it a unique number, not even a proper title. No expectations, right? Maybe it would become a full-fledged story, maybe it wouldn’t, but right now it was just an experiment. No pressure. If an experiment gained a certain critical mass, I would move it over to Word to finish it.

For this story, I captured little fragments and wrote short scene sketches—things that didn’t even make it into the story. Sometimes it was just about capturing a mood. The trick for me was to keep a sense of playfulness about writing by lowering the stakes.

Where are you in this story?

I am a little bit everybody, but I am mostly Sheridan. I really did spend most of my lunches in middle school by myself on the loner bench. Some days I had lunch in the library when even the loner bench didn’t seem safe. One day the vice principal really did try to reach out to me by complimenting my shoes, and it really did freak me out. If he wanted me to feel less alone, he should have done something about the bullying in his school. I just stayed quiet and still until he went away. I wish I had coughed blood on him.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I have just begun what I’m calling “The Great Stephen King Chronological (Re)Read.” I’ve been a fan for a long time, and read him intently in high school in the ’80s. The Talisman was a landmark book for me. I missed some of his earliest books so I decided to buy first editions of everything I needed to fill in the gaps in my library (but not necessarily first printings—I don’t have Stephen King’s money!). I’m up to The Stand now, which I’ve been looking forward to because I started it a few decades ago and never finished it. There’s a flow to his writing that I admire, and he’s great with interiority, which was something I struggled with as I transitioned to prose from screenwriting. In a script, there’s no internal monologue!

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I recently had a humorous horror piece published in The Dread Machine, and I have another story on tap at Lightspeed (and I hope many more to come after that). I’ve just written a long treatment for a middle-grade fantasy novel which I’m looking forward to writing this summer. It’s metaphorically about the climate crisis and the ways in which adults have burdened children with the mess they created. I wish I had the mental bandwidth to work on novels and short fiction at the same time. Whenever I’m doing one, I want to be doing the other. Readers can find more info on my website davidanaxagoras.com.