Originally, my idea was that “Breathing the Air at Wespirtech” would be my first novel… but the idea was way too hard for my writing skills back then. Eventually, twenty years later, I managed to write it as a short story. I absolutely love the song version.
Since I turned my story, “Slug Time” (about a far future scientist trying to make a universal translator), into a catchy 80s-style song, my kids have started using the phrase “slug time” to mean mindless relaxation, which is kinda cool.
The working title for my story “Einray and the Biologist” was “Time Traveling Trees,” which is really a way better title… but kind of a bit of a spoiler? Anyway, it makes a REALLY catchy refrain in the song version.
I had a lot of fun with all the 80s weird synth pop sounds on my Wespirtech soundtrack albums, and I think they worked out especially well in the song version of “My Words Like Silent Raindrops”.
The song for “The Nebula Was Empty” involved some really tricky editing to get the weird radio crackle spoken parts right, but I thought they were a really important counterpart to make the story really come through. Anyway, I’m happy with the result.
I had an amazing 2nd grade teacher. She made us memorize poems. And she told us about the London zoo elephants during the Blitz—which is a lot for a 7-year-old.
Years later I wrote “Of Behemoths and Bureaucrats” and then made it into a song.
The song for “Daisy Chaining” took forever to get right… but I really didn’t mind, because it’s just so much fun, and working on it meant listening to variations over and over and over again. It is an absolute space opera bop.
There’s a lot going on in “The Faithless, the Tentacled, and the Light”—octopus-like aliens, betrayal of friendship, a mercenary weighing her conscience against cash, communication via glowing orbs—but somehow it successfully turned into a song anyway.
“The Genetic Menagerie” was the first story I wrote after college, when I started writing sci-fi seriously. It was about a character and a world I’d been thinking about since I was fourteen. It is unutterably cool to have it be a song now.
My story, “Lunar Cavity,” was briefly published as a stand-alone book by a small publisher who had me remove the tag at the end from Rhiannon’s point of view.
Now that I’m my own publisher, it’s back in, and I made sure to have it in the song too.