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.