I was thinking about the spaces that characters and advertising mascots occupy in our dreams. They’re recurring figures alongside our friends and relatives. I don’t believe that we’ve lost something or whatever because Luke Skywalker shows up instead of a Jungian hermit. That’s what happens when we tell stories in visual media (and when certain companies figure out the best way to your wallet is through your imagination). But I think it’s easy for our brains to grab these characters and mascots and throw them in the mix as a mentor or an enemy.

I love fairy tales and folk tales. I particularly love seeing how they intersect. Go back far enough, and you begin to see how multiple versions of a story spread over time, like tributaries flowing out of a single source. Some fairy tales are thousands of years old. We tell and re-tell them. Languages split from their roots and evolve. Wolves become bears become tigers. The monkey wife becomes a dog bride becomes a mouse maiden. Stories don’t stay the same, and they don’t just entertain and instruct.

It’s so interesting to me that you see that link to Mnemosyne in the story, and I love that you do. I often draw on myth in my work, but this time, I didn’t—at least not consciously. My conscious inspiration was the word “lachrymist” itself. It crossed my path on Twitter as an entry on unusual words (I love words and I follow multiple dictionaries). I was so taken with the definition that I decided to see if I could write a story about a lachrymist.