Upon reading Jessica’s tale, I had to pepper her with questions to get their thoughts on writing and where the idea came from. You can check out The Immortal Question here.

Q1. How did you come up with the idea for this story? Please don’t tell me from personal experience…

I was thinking about the differences between being immortal and being invulnerable, I believe. Depending on who you ask, “immortal” is sometimes defined as someone who won’t die of natural causes, but can still be killed, while other times it means fully invulnerable. It really gets down to what one defines as “mortal,” I suppose. In any case, I wondered about the limits of immortality, and how it might affect the people around the immortal being. Then, naturally, I wondered how it might all go wrong.

Q2. I love how human this story is. No family is perfect, and these small (or large) jealousies happen in every family. Did you know from the outset that this story would be about that?

Not really! That was something that just came out as I wrote, as I questioned who the narrator is and why they would be so willing to look after their brother—and then be so willing to figure his condition out. I suppose jealousy and magical powers go hand-in-hand in my head; I was always so jealous of the characters in the fantasy and sci-fi books I read as a kid. The leap from “a character is immortal but comatose” to “and the person taking care of him is jealous” probably came from there. The fact that the narrator isn’t jealous of Benny’s immortality is kind of unintentionally ironic, isn’t it?

Q3. I love the sound and repetition of ‘And yet…’. What made you write in this way?

These kind of repetitions (Chuck Palahniuk uses them constantly and calls them “choruses”) always strike me as so gimmicky even though I adore them, and it felt like the perfect way to encapsulate how things should be going versus how they actually are. I planned to go back through and replace them with less repetitious wording later, but my beta readers all said it added so much. A good lesson in why you should sometimes ignore that inner critic who hates everything that’s ever been done before.

Q4. How much of your time do you spend writing short stories versus other projects?

Short fiction is a relatively new area for me, and I’ve been dabbling in it for the past few years. Although I love writing novel-length stories that nobody else will ever read, and I love that slow build of characterization and world, shorts are where I feel I can truly contain the entire story in my head at one time. This makes it a lot more straightforward (if not easier) to revise, edit, and rewrite, and a heck of a lot quicker to submit for others to read. Still, probably 25% of my writing time is spent on short stories, and the rest is put into that novel vault that you’ll probably never hear from again.

Q5. What other works do you have on the go? Anything you’d like to promote?

Nothing at the moment! This was my first accepted submission anywhere, something I’ll probably be eternally grateful for, and I’m just pleased as punch to be included. Hopefully it isn’t the last you’ll hear from me.