When you watch Lord of the Rings, you get goosebumps and awe at the epic battle scenes, but it’s Frodo who makes you cry, who scrapes your heart against a cheese grater. I love the tight focus in the midst of something huge and world-encompassing, because it would be easy to write a story about the dragons destroying everything.

Language doesn’t come to me. I choose it, carefully, to reflect the kind of story I’m writing. I went to a very old-fashioned school, back in the day, where we were taught to write by copying models of classical prose. Somewhere in my papers are my Addison and Steele essay, my Francis Bacon essay, my A.A. Milne story, my E.R. Edison story, and others I have thankfully forgotten.

I am absolutely a people watcher, and one of the best places to do it is open-air markets. I find that crowds make people a bit grumpy, unless the crowd has gathered around food. Then the celebratory atmosphere overwhelms the anxiety of being pressed in shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers. You don’t see a lot of frowning people at an open-air market unless the food’s run out.

Almost every subgenre exists in two forms: the purest one, which is just one stage removed from real life, and the one based on prior iterations that is just love for the genre, feeding back on itself. Thus, we have crime fiction that really is based on the culture of illegality and human corruption, and crime fiction that just boils the tropes.

The ways that various cultures define civilization and humanity have always interested me. What if, for these people, the definition of civilization was people who could commit terrible atrocities? What if they believed that goading a people into destroying itself was actually helping them become more civilized? Looking out at the history of colonialism here in the U.S., that definition isn’t that far from the mindset of many European colonizers.