I’ve written quite a few stories with unnamed protagonists, and I honestly thought this was going to be one of them. Then the issue of her name came up within the context of the story, so I knew I couldn’t leave her nameless, but I also knew I couldn’t just give her any name. I wanted something that whispered, but didn’t scream, sadness. Lola is the diminutive form of the name Dolores, which is Spanish for sorrows, and Mae is a Hebrew name meaning bitter.

But in fiction, it’s harder for me to intentionally scare people. I can make a story creepy or disturbing or gory, but scary? That’s deeply personal, and subjective; what one person finds viscerally terrifying another will find utterly mundane. Humor is subjective, too, but most people will groan in response to a well-done pun.

“It Was Never the Fire” started off with an image of a boy eating smoke. I knew in my gut that that was all he ate, and if he ever ate anything else, he wasn’t going to show me. I knew he had secrets, and I knew he wasn’t going to tell just anyone, probably not even me. In fact, he wasn’t telling me much at all. You know how characters can be.

I left Nevada in 1976 and I’ve lived in a number of other places since then, but none have affected my writing more powerfully. I think it’s pretty common for writers to feel an emotional attachment to settings where they spent big chunks of time as children or young adults. But I don’t just have an emotional attachment to Nevada; I’m in love with it.

Virtually all my stories are written intuitively. I don’t really choose narrative strategies consciously—I just see where the story takes me. This makes for lots of interesting course corrections along the way, alas, and more than a few abandoned fragments. (Maybe I should outline.) But I will say that I don’t like stories that over-explain themselves.

For the most part, my time beneath the priory was a void, the rats merely there to keep my bones free from cobwebs and other detritus of the usual sort one finds in limestone abysses. But after the initial disturbance in 1923 and the ensuing explosion, in those decades during which I lay exposed to the merciless sun, there was an albino rat whose ministrations I recall with fondness.