The very first spark that turned into Quentin’s gift came, like so many good things, from Twitter. I believe it was the excellent writer Elizabeth Bear whose biography used to read, “I tell lies to people for money.” And it’s such a great description of part of the writer’s job (the other part, of course, being that we tell truths to people for money) that it stuck in my head, and made my want to do something with it.

I first encountered “Traveller’s Rest” on reading the Wollheim/Carr anthology WORLD’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION: 1966. (It also appeared in Judith Merril’s The 11th ANNUAL OF THE YEAR’S BEST SF, making it one of only two stories Wollheim/Carr and Merril agreed on in the two years their books overlapped.) But I confess I don’t remember it from that reading. Several years ago, I came back to it.

Grass is ordinary and relentless, like the domination of the family and the rules of everyday life. It ties things (and princesses) down, with countless tiny, tough threads, a mass of them, almost impossible to sever, and even if you break free, these tiny threads leave scars.

The unreliable narrator, for me, tied into the idea of being a teenager on summer break, and everyone always asking what you did during those weeks. Would anyone ever believe you if you had a fantastic adventure—would you believe you, or was it just something you made up to pass the time while you mourned your aunt in your endless summer backyard?

when I decided I wanted to do a story centering around a phoenix, I started to patch a lot of different phoenix myths together. But my favourite is the most common one. The medieval phoenix, resembling a predatory bird, that dies and is reborn again from its ashes. I guess I’ve Harry Potter to thank for that.

I started “Morning Child,” then an untitled fragment, about ten years before I finished it. I wrote a few pages, then lost steam on the story and put it away in a file drawer. Ten years later, I was going through old files, happened to pick up the fragment and looked at it, and suddenly saw how I could finish it. A couple of days later, I had.