In recent years there’s been a lot of good conversation about representation in adventure fantasy. One of my favorite critiques has been a response to people who claim erroneously that the presence of nonwhites and combatant women in medieval Europe isn’t “plausible.”

I wanted this story to have a very accessible point of view character—someone we could recognize and empathize with whether they were male, female, or other. Choosing the right narrator—and right distance from that narrator, whether it’s first person, third person, close third person, or omniscient—changes the overall emotional effect of the story, so I think that’s key.

A news story I saw about being able to print a gun with a 3D printer [was the seed for the story]. I just didn’t realize it would happen for some reason, even though it was obvious that we’d end up being able to print guns down the line.

Most of my story ideas come from mashing together whatever I’ve got in my head, and sometimes the things in my head are close to home. Around the time I was drafting this story, there was a rockslide at Snoqualmie Pass. That particular slide involved relatively small rocks, but in the past there have been rockslides involving boulders the size of cars.

I never really lived near the woods, but I had friends who did. We’d run around and skin our knees and climb boulders and jump into sand pits and it never occurred to us that anything we did was remotely dangerous because little girls are immortal, after all.

The notion of children who remain children permanently inevitably called up the idea of Peter Pan, who inevitably invoked the phantom of the Great God Pan and his seductive pipes.