I’ve actually been trying to write this story for a while. I started with my fear of flying—which I’ve always thought is a bit of a misnomer, because I’m fine with flying. What I’m actually afraid of is the constant potential of falling. But I believe in trying to write about what scares you, so I tried to turn the idea of free fall into a story.

I’m a little obsessed with the physical act of falling. There’s something about it that’s beautifully, dreadfully naked. It’s hard to maintain any sort of mask or fakery when you’re taking a surprise plunge toward the ground. My sister, Shannon, and I once filmed a few of our friends as they pretended to be shot. The most interesting part was when they fell down. No matter how cheesy or slapstick or dramatic they made it, something about their fall was a reflection of their personalities.

“The Puzzle” is a part of SEVEN TOUCHES OF MUSIC, one of my ten mosaic novels. It is a book about how music occasionally offers us glimpses into deeper levels of reality. The idea seemed very inspirational indeed, so I have written as much as seven variations of the basic theme.

I wrote this story while I was at Clarion West. The whole thing — character, voice, action — just sort of sprang, as it were, completely out of nowhere. I stole the name Springheel Jack from the notorious early nineteenth-century monster, but the shiny red boots were a riff on the fairy tale of the red shoes. Instead of making you dance until you drop, these boots make you steal until you drop.

I was walking in Niagara Falls, Canada, far from the strip, with my husband. We had gotten lost and ended up on a residential street — all these tiny bungalows so close to massive hotels. I wondered what it was like to live in a small town that was also a huge tourist attraction. I wanted to write a story that took place on a space station as the ultimate closed community — an exaggeration of the trapped feeling of living in a small town, juxtaposed against the freely mobile wealthy visitors.

I’ve written a mystery series set in the Old West — the Holmes on the Range novels — so I’ve done a ton of research into cowboy life and slang. One of the things I enjoyed most about writing the Holmes on the Range books was the chance to throw around a lot of colorful words and turns of phrase, so I did that in “The Herd,” too.

I was living in rural Virginia, where the fragments of slavery and interracial breeding were still swirling around — one of the people I knew was a guy whose male ancestor was either R.J. or Hardin Reynolds — [of the] Reynolds Tobacco family. We saw what had happened, but didn’t always understand why things had happened. The Reynolds family sold a slave, apparently because the other slaves hated him, and bought a piano with the money. I don’t know if that’s a true narrative or not …