I really love speculative fiction that blends genres and plays with our expectations, like fantasy stories that take place in the far-distant future. I knew immediately that I wanted to take the fantastical elements of the fairy tale and put them into a cosmic setting, and if I wanted this place to be imbued with the kind of ancient magic that has all but disappeared in the face of modern technology and science, then my sleeping beauty would have to be dormant and undisturbed on some distant and hard-to-find world.

I was having a discussion with a friend … and I tried to explain how I react to stories. Words have textures, tastes to me. Sentences are entire literal flavour palates. Some stories clang. Others whisper. Some seethe with diamond dust, others taste like drowning. And when I’m writing, I’m almost trying to transpose a framework of a meal onto actual text? (Wow. That sounded pretentiously artsy.) But that’s kind of how my brain functions.

India is like an alternate reality where religiosity and liberalism live side by side, often uneasily. You walk down a row of shining skyscrapers that wouldn’t be out of place in New York or London, turn a corner, and suddenly come upon an overhanging tree with a shrine embedded into its trunk, or a cross marking the spot where a martyr fell centuries ago, or a saffron coloured Lingam (a phallic stone object representing Shiva), and it wouldn’t be unusual to see a person in a $2,000 suit get out of a chauffeur-driven Bentley and offer prayers on that spot, even at the cost of obstructing traffic.

This was a relic, supposedly, yes, a bit of foreskin from Jesus Christ. I read somewhere that an angel put this in Saint Bridget’s mouth and she had a vision. Saint Catherine outdid her: she wore Christ’s foreskin as a ring. Mystical marriage, indeed. And it’s just odd how Indigenous beliefs bleed in and out of Mexican Catholicism. You look at something like the cult of Maximón, which is a sort of blend of Pre-hispanic ideas about gods and Catholic saints, and you end up concluding the world is strange and you know nothing about it.