This story started with a voice. Almost literally—I was living in Iowa at the time, in this nice apartment with hardwood floors and lots of light, and at some point the opening sentence just came to mind: “I am ugliness in body and bone, breath and heartbeat.” The voice was very distinct, very compulsive, very easy to write because of how much drive it had. Looking at the piece a number of years after I wrote it, I think the parts where ugliness narrates her experience as ugliness were what came first

If you were only your brain, what about having a body would you look forward to the most? What if your hypothetical body was modular, and you could pick the exact variations you wanted? What if you had to buy everything separately? Would you bother with duplicate kidneys if one would do? What if you could only afford eyes or ears, but not both?

One of the real joys of collaborating is that when one author finds something tricky, it might be something that plays to the strengths of the other writer—or if that’s not the case, any challenges are usually solved by the fresh perspective a collaborator brings. With our collaborations, we each always argue that we’ve done less than half of the work—there’s that magic extra bit that neither of us takes credit for.

I love the ideas of cities as mythic places. And not just cities of myth, but the cities that exist in our world that we build up myths and stories around. I think a good case can be made that New York is the premier mythic city in America. We tell stories about it, we sing songs about what it means to make it there, it has a certain symbolic weight. I wanted to pull the unicorn hunt out of tapestries (although those live in New York as well, at The Cloisters) and into a modern myth.

“The Dark Age” comes entirely from that place of feeling that I was doing exactly what my family needed me to do in order to care and provide for them, and by doing so, I was constantly orbiting them, missing out on all of the moments I so badly longed to witness. To this day, “The Dark Age” takes me back to that place.

I tried to ponder about the essential differences between artificial and so-called natural. It was a pleasure to describe such digital beings, which are so odd and so beautiful. But I also tried—and am still trying—to understand the relation between the inner secret world and the external self, biological or non-biological.

I’ve had the idea for a body-swapping SF story in my head for quite a number of years, I think; it’s just one of those things that occupies my attention every now and then, possibly to a far unhealthier extent than it should.