I hope the ending is surprising in a good way! I didn’t quite know the ending but it became very clear where it should be fairly quickly. I wanted to really play up the tension between a sort of helpless self-indulgence and an intense desire to be better, and somehow it metastasized into something really scary (I hope).

I am a sucker for a hopeful ending. I may be a mediocre-to-terrible organizer myself, but I believe very deeply in the power of organizing, activism, and collective movement to change the world, which is not a pie in the sky statement. It means changing laws, policies, practices, and individual behavior—and there are literal step-by-step instructions for how to do all of these things! But it does require decades (and centuries?) of sustained effort and faith.

When I was a rookie firefighter with less than a year on the job, I heard a friend speak his last words over the radio. It took me years to write a story in which I could put characters in the position of grappling with the aftermath of a violent death like that. I had no interest in setting it in a firehouse, even a thoroughly fictionalized one. My own feelings about it were too precarious and unresolved.

I think that what people find attractive about finding a parallel self is that it gives you an opportunity to see how your life could have gone but didn’t. I assume everyone fantasizes about that sometimes—what your life would be like if you’d chosen a different career or gone to a different school or a million other choices that cascade down to form a completely different life. In the real world, there’s no way to see what would have happened.

For much of the composition I thought that the narrator would eventually be moved to a violent act of revenge against Ariella’s new guy; some scene where he would use his superior size and strength to pummel the bastard into the ground. As frequently happens. I discovered what the story was really about only upon getting there. One thing it occurs to me that I narrowly escaped was the “fridging” motivation.