We’re excited to have “How to Build a Homecoming Queen: A Guide by a Bad Asian Girl” in Lightspeed Magazine! How did this story come into being, and what are the inspirations behind it? I’m excited that this story is in Lightspeed too! The first scene of this story came to me in a dream. […]

I wrote this story for a contest. The prompts were “veteran” and “art museum.” I’ve written several stories set on Kata Space Station (including “Gateway Night,” which appeared in the DAW anthology Love & Rockets in 2010), and I thought that would be an interesting place for a museum, since it’s where four different kinds of people interact with each other.

This story is a total wish fulfillment fantasy for me. I grew up in deep South Texas, very close to Mexico, and when the Trump administration started closing down the border, I kept seeing places I knew in the news, little towns no one ever cared about before. For example, one news report showed young men corralled for deportation in the McAllen International Airport, a place I’ve flown in and out of multiple times.

I keep carnivorous plants, including a Nepenthes I’ve had for many years. I used to post photos of my Nepenthes online, but a subset of men would compare the pitchers to genitalia. Which configuration of genitalia changed each time, but there were always comments, and I began to resent sharing my plant at all.

I had a lot of scraps of ideas that hadn’t coalesced into a story yet, and after a long enough period of agitating in my head, they all clumped together. For example, I had this idea of a tidal-locked water world whose only surface liquid water was on the side locked to its star. I liked the idea but couldn’t really get a plot to adhere to it.