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.

[The story] is set in a world where matter transmitters are taken for granted by most people, at least by the youngest members of society, who have entirely grown up with them. This technology, d-mat, doesn’t use a wormhole or anything like that: It analyses a thing, destroying it in the process, and then creates an identical copy somewhere else.