Being a teenager is horrifying! There is the horror of your body suddenly being outside of your control, for one, and it’s so messy and gross and bloody and smelly and hairy and you have all of these feelings, all without your consent.

Years ago I read that Bill Gates has a turn-of-the-century fully AI-enabled house. Everything in it is specialized for its inhabitants. I wondered: What if it was left empty? Alone. Without purpose.

I’ve been meaning to write a boto story for so long—like years—but I could never really find the right entry point for it. There’s a really great Atlantic article by Sushma Subramanian called “The Dolphin Myth that Refuses to Die” that explores the origins and perpetuation of the boto myth in the Amazon. That article really got me thinking about my adoption.

I was moved to write not a dark fairy tale itself, but a dark story about fairy tales. My starting point was, “what if someone became obsessed with fairy stories, what then?” This made me think about the infamous Cottingley fairies, and the attempts to discover “real” fairies. I imagined an old French woman painstakingly hunting for real magic in her life.

Each volunteer might have their own reasons why working with incarcerated people is meaningful but maybe fundamentally it has to do with prisoners being humans, and like the rest of humanity, there is a need for them to be emotionally healthy and to develop both intellectually and artistically.

I don’t have the privilege to put school shootings out of mind all the time. If push came to shove, I’d absolutely die for my students, for other people’s children, even though it is more than we should ask of someone who doesn’t get hazard pay or combat training.

How many articles do we read about how doctors don’t take women’s pain seriously? How many stories have we all heard of women getting diagnosed with fat and anxiety instead of cancer? How often do men scoff at menstrual pain?

Sometimes we are at the mercy of things that scare us, and those things become our voice and they control our lives until we are destroyed by those very things. That lends itself to the horror genre very well, I believe.

The best horror stories are a gateway to another world, another life. You are no longer just reading, but feeling that dread alongside the main character. Your skin is crawling, your chest feels tight.

For me, characters, more than anything else, have always driven my appreciation of fiction. When I, the conduit, manage to portray my characters authentically when they tell me their stories, it leaves an indescribable feeling of satisfaction; job well done, Nuzo.