I like starting in the middle and then backing up. In “Hypnopompic Circumstance” that middle was “Thomas’s first encounter with the alien was terrifying.” It works for the reader because now there are a lot of questions in need of answers (who is the alien, why is Thomas the only one encountering it, how many encounters have there been, etc.) which keeps them interested. Possibly as important, by starting with this kind of sentence, I’m interested in writing more.

These caretakers may be doing their genuine best to help Jain and Stromile, but they don’t understand what they’re doing. Humans need food and water and shelter more than they need understanding, but it’s a close thing. We are all driven by this mad desire to have other people really get us, to make the neural ghost in someone else’s head as close as possible to the one we carry in ours. The caretakers can keep Jain alive, but they’ll never get closer to knowing her than Stro did, and the facsimile is uniquely painful for that reason.

“The Giving One,” like all the Burnt Empire legends, is loosely based on a legend from the great story cycle, The Mahabharata. I first wrote about it in my Mahabharata Series published in India over a decade ago. I adapted it freely and brought it into line with the timeline and character history of the Burnt Empire trilogy, especially A Dark Queen Rises.

Given all of that, how did my consciousness end up in this particular skull, right here? Why do I have an experiential reality, and why is it (to the best of my awareness) singular, distinct, and specific to this body, this place, and this time? I’m a consciousness, you’re a consciousness, why don’t I have the inherent access to your experiences and not my own? Why does my “I” pointer point where it does?