I think writing about frightening things is a very primal way in which we cope with them; we’ve probably been telling horror stories since we first began telling stories at all. But for people who face oppression and marginalization and daily peril because of who they are, I think fiction is even more powerful, because telling stories is a form of resistance.

One insidious aspect of prejudice is the effect it has on a person’s self-worth. That’s the metaphor behind “The Lord of Corrosion.” Not only does the title represent a monster, but it also represents the cultural messaging that can eat away at a person’s self-esteem. For a child like Sofia, she has no concept of being different, because her fathers didn’t raise her to think in prejudicial terms.

For this story, I wanted to write about a variety of queer Asian American ladies. Luckily, I know many queer Asian American ladies, and our myriad experiences—both the commonalities and the differences—helped me put together a number of characters whose lives I felt were plausible in this setting. They’re not meant to be representative of Every Queer Asian American Woman, because I believe that the idea of an extant One True Narrative is total bullshit.

I have a disturbing weakness for the Victorian gothic, and if you’re playing in that wheelhouse, Dorian Gray is as queer as they come. Oscar Wilde was a genius, Dorian is his finest creation, and if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

A “skins” role is one in which the performer acts, either singly, or, as in the case of Syd and Peggy, doubly in an animal skin. I myself performed a skins role when I played King Rat in the pantomime DICK WHITTINGTON. There is something peculiar and distinctive about performing a “skins” role. It is when such recollections and preoccupations merge in the imagination that a story begins to form itself.

I spent five years in university research labs, coding and analyzing surveys. That probably sounds boring to a lot of people, but the analytical part of my mind really loved it, and I thought it would be fun to write a piece with a psychology questionnaire as a framing device. It took a while and a couple false starts to find the right story to tell this way.

I’m a runner and its endorphin trance gives rise to ideas. During a very long run, I began to think about the nightmarish film version of THE RED SHOES, based on Hans Christian Anderson’s bizarre fairy tale. I was also thinking about obsessive types who run 100-mile marathons and about the toxic ambitions that fuel much of L.A. The story began to fall together.

I wanted to write about a particular time and place, but in a short story you don’t have space to actually explain the history and if it’s not one of the handful of historical contexts you can generally expect a broad anglophone readership to be familiar with, then you might as well write it as an SFnal secondary-world fantasy. So I did.