For quite a while now, I’ve been writing about a highly improbable far-future human civilization called The Ten Thousand Worlds that stretches along The Spray, our arm of the galaxy. There’s Old Earth, which has become as forgotten as the font of civilization as Uruk is to us today. Then there are the Grand Foundational Domains, the first planets settled aeons ago that are now vast, complex, wealthy societies. Then there are the secondary worlds, peopled by misfits and oddballs who felt hemmed-in on the Foundationals. And there are quite a few minor and disregarded planets where you take your chances, just like backpacking through some parts of Earth today.

The initial idea I had was to write a straightforward zombie story, where the zombies suddenly stop attacking the living, and the living have to learn to coexist with their dead brethren. As I started planning the story, I just wasn’t excited about writing it as a zombie story, so I figured readers wouldn’t be excited, either. That’s when I came up with the idea of making the dead humans hosts for aliens. So the stingers came before Josephine. Once I knew what I wanted the overall setup to be, I started thinking about what sort of character and situation might make for a compelling storyline.

I had the idea for the sinister monk using bells to get around many years ago, when I was dreaming up the adventures of a character named China Scott, who was based on the amazing explorer Alexandra David-Neel. I never wrote a single China Scott story, but the images hung around.

The story grew out of reflections on how much of life for many people is spent in the fantasy worlds created by movies, books, games, or their own imagination—and also how many occupations now are carried out at a remove from the real world. Saying “the real world” seems wrong—what is reality if we’re not in it?

I am an autumn girl, a Halloween girl, a bonfires and cornfields pumpkin patch trick-or-treat girl. Given the chance, I’ll open everything in October. More than that, I adore harvest stories. I think the harvest is one of the most powerful liminal ideas of the American psyche, and since I wanted this to be a very Americana story, I wanted that power.

I care passionately about language—but not altogether, I hope, at the expense of story. It’s absolutely true that I’m very particular about the stylistic aspects of a story, and while I find the wordsmith/storyteller comparison interesting and probably true, there’s another I’d like to cite alongside it. Unfortunately I forget who said it, but according to an article I once read, all writers are either “Dickensian” or “Nabokovian.” The Dickensian writer’s central concern is with life in the round, the vast panoply of existence, the “God’s eye view,” if you like, whereas the Nabokovian’s focus is narrower, more internal, obsessed with detail and with the subject of obsession itself.

Grief is a powerful emotion. It can drive people to do any number of things they might not ordinarily do. […] But our past is what makes us who we are; we are that collection of experiences and relationships, and by denying his past, Sam is left only with senseless fighting and dying around him to identify who he is. That’s not a great place to be.