I’m always curious about the background of a story. What was the inspiration and writing process for “Ghost in the Tank” like?

The story came directly out of two incidents around the same time last summer: a con released a panel description complaining about the existence of too many lesbian stories, and a couple of gaming websites started mass-censoring/banning queer games and creators. The way these events overlapped made both even more frustrating; looking back at my early handwritten notes for this story, the first line is “too many lesbians” in scare quotes. I could point to countless similar examples that also played a part in inspiring this story: Twitch marking queer content as “sensitive,” YouTube demonetizing videos that so much as say “gay” or “lesbian,” the fact that the mere existence of queer people can be deemed inappropriate. Growing up, I internalized the belief that the sight of two women kissing was more offensive than graphic violence. A world in which snuff videos are okay and queer intimacy is censored might strike some readers as unrealistic . . . but I think that’s the least fictional part of this story. (Then there are the smaller, sillier pieces of inspiration: replaying the ghost-fights is just racing your ghost in Mario Kart but make it sad and weird.)

In terms of process, I wrote the first draft during my final week at Clarion West last year, so it was not my usual process! I typically identify as a slow writer and meticulous outliner. In this case, I had one sleep-deprived week in which to write and submit a (mostly) complete piece. The published version hasn’t changed too much since that draft, although the brackets like [describe some things] and [make this part good] are now gone! I don’t write a ton of SF, and I remember feeling incredibly nervous to share the first draft with my classmates. I probably wouldn’t have gone back to finish it without the encouragement of my classmates and our instructor that week, Martha Wells. Special thanks to Rukman Ragas, Kehkashan Khalid, and Rida Altaf, who dragged this story over the finish line.

One of my personal favorite devices is the use of intimate second person like you are doing here with a first person narrator telling this story directly to a specific second person character as if in a letter or confession. Can you give us some insight into why this form of second person was right for the story and how it informed your writing?

This is one of my favorite devices, too! I think my love for this style—which I tend to describe as first-person direct address rather than second-person, since it’s all about the “I”—comes from my affection for the dramatic monologues of Romantic or Victorian poetry. Think Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (“Will’t please you sit and look at her?”) or Christina Rossetti’s “The Convent Threshold” (“There’s blood between us, love”), poems built around a shivery moment where you-the-reader feel implicated in the story being told. I love the way direct address can make a reader immediately uneasy, so I wanted to do something similar here: The first line of the story (“The first time you killed me . . .”) reads like an accusation, which I hope it feels a bit jarring, even if only momentarily.

Beyond that, too, I think direct address lends itself well to a story about obsession. For me, this story is all about peering into Emel’s head, so it had to be told in her voice—and every thought, for her, revolves about Mira, the “you,” who she could never address this honestly outside of her own head. And I also love trapping the reader in the head of a character who is also trapped in some way. I’m fond of the way in which the appearance of the real “you” can trouble the kind of claustrophobic intimacy we can get from direct address: When Mira actually appears on the page, she’s not quite the same as the “you” Emel has been addressing, which is disorienting for Emel and perhaps also for the reader.

While reading, I found myself really compelled by when you chose to repeat words or phrases and how that repetition demonstrated character and narrative progression. Did you have a process or method that guided your choices to repeat and where?

For a while, this story’s working title was “Again, Again,” so I was definitely thinking a lot about repetition! Actually, to some extent, I’m thinking about repetition any time I’m writing. Sound and rhythm are always top-of-mind for me, and intentional repetition is often a big part of that; I can’t call a draft finished until I’m happy with the way it sounds. (This goes back to my typical outlining process: I want to know every single thing that’s going to happen in a story before I begin so that I can focus entirely on the language itself once I start to draft!) Mostly this is instinct rather than structured process, but I do end up reading my drafts aloud more times than I can count.

So, repetition is a go-to for me, especially—and especially in this story—repetition with a difference in meaning. Like direct address, this is something I love in poetry that I’ve tried to steal for my own purposes: I love when poets play with forms that rely on repetition, like the villanelle, and I am a sucker for unexpected uses of anaphora or epistrophe. There’s an Elizabeth Bishop line I adore: “Nature repeats herself, or almost does: / repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.” I think repeat/revise might be the most natural, most fundamental of structures. We look for patterns and exceptions, we try and try again, we replay old memories on loop while asking “but what if this one thing were different?” This story makes that literal: Not only does repeat/revise happen frequently on a line level, but that’s the plot. Emel repeats and repeats and repeats, looking for a way to revise, revise, revise. With this or any story, I’m always trying to make the line level echo the biggest big-picture themes.

The setting of this story is not so dissimilar from internet and influencer culture now. Do you consider this story a cautionary tale of what’s to come if culture doesn’t change its course, or is this only a subtle exaggeration and the die is already cast?

This is a difficult question in the best way, and I think my answer is “both, maybe neither?” While I do have a lot of thoughts on internet and influencer culture, I wouldn’t call this story a cautionary tale, exactly—or at least I didn’t set out to issue some kind of warning to the reader. As a reader, I don’t particularly like stories where there’s a clear lesson, and I don’t love writing those stories. The thing that compels me about speculative fiction is generally not the way it can be used to ask questions or make claims about the future but rather the way it allows us to view the present from new angles. If I had to pick, then, I’d say this story is more exaggeration of our present than warning of what’s to come.

I think our current culture often demands the performance of vulnerability—go ahead, offer up your most intimate self for public consumption, you’re the product now, give us moremoremore!—and then responds to that vulnerability with a gleeful, sneering revulsion. That’s the intersection of technology/culture that I wanted to explore with this story, coupled with the issues of censorship I mentioned earlier: these cruel and strange dynamics, we want you and we hate you, we’re obsessed with you and we would destroy you if we could. So, the question that interests me is not “will technology/culture continue to develop in this particular way?” but rather “what does this do to people?” And that’s not a near- or far-future problem; that’s a right-now problem. It’s bleak, so the story is bleak. At the same time, though, I’m also not trying to issue a doom-or-gloom statement on the state of the world. So many things feel dire right now, but I’d like to think that the die isn’t already cast. I’m a big believer in the radical uses of hope. We must believe in the possibility of a better world. We must refuse to listen to those who would tell us otherwise.

What other stories or projects do you have out or coming out soon that you can share?

I’ve got a couple of stories coming out soon-ish, including a story in Fusion Fragment that I’ve been describing as “Julian of Norwich gets launched into space,” which is not accurate but also not inaccurate. Other than “Ghost in the Tank,” though, my favorite thing I’ve published in 2026 is “The Last God of Talam Dor”(bit.ly/3QIyg6d), a dark fantasy novelette that explores a lot of the same themes as this story: the intersections of queerness and shame, desire and devotion, love and suffering. I would recommend that one to anyone who read “Ghost in the Tank” and thought “if only this story had a semi-hopeful ending and also a keen interest in ancient and medieval myth and theology.” All my publications can be found at www.m-r-robinson.com!

I’m also currently working on a novel (or three, as is the way) but the biggest project devouring my free time right now is OTHERSIDE (bit.ly/4tdAUhM), a new magazine of speculative literature by 2SLGBTQIA+ authors, where I’m one of the co-founders and editors-in-chief. Issue 1 came out in March; by the time this interview is out, we’ll have just released Issue 2, and we’ll be preparing to open again to submissions in July! Like I mentioned, this is a tough time for queer creators and stories, so I hope curious readers will consider checking OTHERSIDE out. I’m very proud of the work we’re doing.