The bird’s been nesting in my brain since 2009, and this is the seventh story she’s in, but before this, humans were always part of the intended audience. So this is me exploring what mechanicals might say when we’re not around—which is a deliberate mirror on marginalized human experiences, but it’s the only thematic aspect that was deliberate. My conscious brain isn’t in charge of that stuff. I was just writing in December 2016-February 2017, as a chronically ill non-citizen US resident with many friends in scary situations.

I experienced a lot of that bullying you mention when I was young. I was someone who was perceived as a weird, feminine boy, and in the 1980s and early 1990s that was a very hard thing to be. There are many stories out there about LGBTQ people dealing with this awful, crushing weight of difference and exclusion and violence. I think, though, that it’s important to have stories that are not dark and brutal.

Exploring otherness is, I think, the essential work of the fiction writer. We develop our skills by sitting on the outside edges and observing; we create people on the page who are not (to the extent that we can help it) ourselves. The better we are at creating not-us on the page, the better people think we are at writing fiction. This is all very lovely and twisty, because of course, we can’t write anything but ourselves.

I have trouble with commas. I know, I know, but it’s true! I tend to view punctuation as a way to pace and space a sentence: When I put a comma in, it’s because I want the reader to take a breath before plunging onward. It’s almost like writing very long structured poetry. When I’m working in first person, I can get away with it, to a degree, but when I move to third, or even second, it can get awkward.

I’ve written a few Heaven and/or Hell stories over the years, including my first published horror story, “Clearance to Land,” and the Johnny Cash tribute “The Train Stops.” One of my many novels in progress is yet another visit to the inferno, which you may or may not see completed at some point. (I am not currently working on it, so don’t hold your breath; just saying that I’m not quite done with the questions.) Many folks attack the trope at one time or another, whether they’re believers or not.