I love bugs. The first species I really fell in love with were European honeybees, but after staring at bees for hours and hours every day to collect data, I realized most bugs aren’t so bad (see, I used to be afraid of them). Wasps are particularly unfairly maligned.

I really did spend most of my lunches in middle school by myself on the loner bench. Some days I had lunch in the library when even the loner bench didn’t seem safe. One day the vice principal really did try to reach out to me by complimenting my shoes.

Because I create stories by poking and prodding at the concept in my journal, asking myself endless questions. Some of the questions I scribbled during the week after those earlier entries above were: “Why did the mother go into space? Was she a scientist?”

I drew on Hawaiian history, specifically the story of Kamehameha and how he unified the islands with an armada of war canoes and soldiers. I haven’t read many stories that draw inspiration from my culture and wanted to try my hand at expanding it.

I loved the process of building Muna’s world: the social hierarchies and stereotypes that govern the lives of immigrants and othered folk in Barish; the world of writing, publishing, bookselling; the kind of story Muna would be driven to write, what obstacles she might face in pursuing her dreams; and also the intertextual bits i.e., the excerpt from Muna’s work in progress, and the references to the Halfborn series and the latest bestseller.