I believe the initial idea came to me after I watched a video on how Singapore imports and dredges sand to shore up its land mass, spawning illegal dredging operations and disputes with neighboring countries. As climate change worsens, these battles for every resource—even sand—will increase. Most Americans still think of climate change as a problem happening somewhere else or in the future, so I thought, why not bring this already existing dystopian climate reality back home?

I’m fascinated by the process of translation from one language to another. I’m fascinated by how a foreign language might have the perfect word for something that has no single word in one’s native tongue (like the Japanese word “komorebi,” which means “sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees” or the German word “schadenfreude”—both words which have no single-word equivalents in English).

This story is based on a dream I had in spring 2019. A wild, sad dream, where I was desperately trying to jump to the moon. And on the jump, I saw these fantastic colors all around me. Purples and pinks streaking past me. And I remember waking up literally feeling like I was falling. Like I was being pulled into the Earth. It was terrifying and so intense. So naturally, I tried to recreate it with words.

I think that as I’ve developed as a writer, I’ve gained three main tools. The first is faith that I’m eventually going to get to the end, because I usually do, even if I have no idea how and it really doesn’t look like I will. The second is perseverance (rejections, blah blah). The third is actually knowing when to give up on something. I think that’s the real paradox of being a writer—you have to have so much blind faith and perseverance…

I had generated a flash piece based on the title, which was the list of tourist brochure entries that made it more or less intact, albeit totally reordered, into the final story. I realized that, although that list tells a story of its own, it isn’t one with the emotional impact I wanted, which led me to go back and imagine what kind of person might read such a brochure and visit these places. Once I had Mer in mind, I wrote his scenes out of order.