My first RPG character was for basic D&D, and he was an elf. Basic didn’t have classes and races as distinct things, so elves were a kind of fighter/wizard combination. I loved that character, and the adventures we had have stuck with me for nearly thirty years. So I’m partial to elves and spellcasters from that experience. The odd spells of D&D have always fascinated me, as well as the names. It’s probably no surprise to any RPG veteran that Briggsby’s name is meant to be a reference to an old-school wizard.

This is where the “strange effect” of fiction is really quite powerful. Being able to sympathize with people completely unlike ourselves helps open our minds to what others in the real world are going through. I try to remember this when I find myself judging people whose ambitions have lead them astray. We have a political and corporate climate right now that makes it easy to lose sympathy for people. There are some folks out there who are reviled by many, and I think it would break our hearts to learn how much some of them loathe themselves.

True fact: when I first read Orwell’s 1984 (back when I was a tiny!Merc and didn’t quite get a lot of the political commentary), I was miffed that things like the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love were not literal. Tiny!Merc was outraged that these names were, in fact, hiding something quite different. When I grew older and eventually got the irony, it really became all that much scarier. Naming something that has connotations of positive concepts when the thing is really fucking terrifying is a mind game all its own.

When I was a kid, I remember thinking there was no way for me to know if the world existed billions of years before me, or if it came into being the day I was born, and all the rest was just a very old scenography, with all the people coming along with it, complete with fake memories. That was my first taste of solipsism, and a part of me still thinks I was not far off. As a matter of fact . . . what is the difference between the two? From my point of view, the world’s past exists only if I exist. So, in a way, it didn’t exist before I was born.

When I was travelling into a library in Manchester researching the Napoleonic Wars for Dream Paris, it occurred to me that I was living on the edge of a city that had gone through these changes in the nineteenth century and I’d not been writing about it. Since then, it seems like I’ve walked the length and breadth of the city’s streets thinking about fantasy stories. I’ve filled Evernote with notes and pictures. Now I just need the characters to populate those backdrops . . .