At the back of my mind I’d had an idea about how contact with the alien would lead to us becoming progressively more alien ourselves. All I did was bolt that notion onto a simple war story and “Scales” was born.

He “saw” what he said he saw: Zeus in a toaster pastry. Rather, that’s what he perceived, since sight is a combination of what photons strike our retinas and how we interpret the resulting signals to the brain.

Angela also feels generic. She can’t compete with Bibi’s exoticism in a culture that pits girls against one another.

The action of the latter half of the story is set around a particular stretch of road in Cherokee National Forest. That road is the exact last place I’d ever want to run into hungry dead things, so of course I had to stick my characters there.