This is actually the second in a series of shorts I hope to write one day. And yes, they’re all centred around rainmaking. The inspiration came from the lack of water rights I experienced in Zaria. While I grew up in megacities or locales where every home either had a borehole system, or water supply from the government, Zaria had wells instead. And these wells, they swelled or sank in tune with the weather.

For God’s sake, write the kind of stories you’re not comfortable with. Don’t stick to plots you can write in your sleep. Bother yourself. Be nervous about whether you’re going too far, or revealing too much. Don’t do exactly what you did last time. Don’t try to figure out the formula of a popular market. Be like the person who accidentally walks on stage naked. Don’t worry about your dignity.

We don’t need dystopian stories anymore: we need stories for a dystopian audience. There is overlap, and this need not be a radically new thing; there are excellent examples across the history of SF/F. The trend I see, that I want to see more of, is speculative fiction as a medicine for our existential despair—and ideally not just as a numbing agent. There are many ways to accomplish this.

Midland, Texas was the closest big town to where I grew up, and it had a mall, and in that mall there was the Gold Mine—this videogame arcade. Every once in a while, while our moms were shopping, a friend and me would get ditched there with a couple dollars for quarters, which we’d always blow through in about ten seconds. Or, we’d lose them even faster when we put them up for the next game.

I started playing around with the ideas that people believe they know everything about their partners and that they wouldn’t change a thing about them. If such an idealist were confronted with multiple variations of their partner, with one of them being the original, would they be able to find the exact one? Would they be tempted to pick one with more desirable traits than the original?