Novels usually start for me as dreams. That’s because I tend to feed my subconscious ideas consciously. I feed the things I want to write about and then they come out. Obviously, not in the ways I expect. But I also devote a lot of time to learning technique. When I’m writing a novel, even one like this, if I’m reading another novel, I might plug in a technique I just saw used by somebody else in an unusual way. And then take it out again. Just to see how it works. It’s a weird combination of the subconscious process and very conscious mechanical process too.