I think that money provides motivations capable of damning us all, and that the man who accepts the offer would protest at great length about any characterization of himself as evil. He thinks he is above the temptation, and he may even be right. But since he is unambiguously human, we can measure what he is better than we can measure the representative of the unknown organization.

I have a lot of experience, both professionally and personally, with disasters. I won’t insult the people who’ve also endured these life-changing events and their slow, painful aftermath by referring to the good that can come of them, but there’s no doubt that they result in profound destabilization of forms, physical and otherwise, both in a positive and negative sense. Significant hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, flooding, ice storms, tsunamis, all that nature throws at us and the slew of human-created disasters as well, teach victims the hard way that their lives are fragile and temporally insignificant.

Living through COVID-19 made it absolutely necessary for me to tell this story. We are all being impacted by the very best and worst of human behavior right now, and the consequences will be felt for decades. I would like to believe that humanity will ultimately choose unity in an apocalyptic situation, if only to increase our chances for survival, but human history contradicts this. Even now, people still refuse to take the necessary steps to ensure their safety and the safety of the broader community.

I think a lot about the power dynamics of the immortal/human relationships in monster-centric stories. These fictional relationships often have happy endings these days, but not always. A failed romance both guts and fascinates me. For the ice maiden, I wanted to write a figure who was a little too alien to be fully understood by a random human and naïve enough to assume that all humans are fools.