The Origin

Q. What inspired you to write this book? Was there a particular moment or event that sparked the idea?

Ans. After three stories set centuries ago, I wanted the next one to step into a world readers would recognise. Lia lives in Singapore, now, and she lives two lives: the quiet one everyone around her sees, and the other one, where she commands the most feared faction in an enormous online game. I wanted to know what happens when people start crossing from one half of her into the other. Then I wanted to go somewhere very different for the second story, to Vienna in 1887, and a watchmaker's daughter who treats a feeling the way her father treats a clock. She takes it apart to find out what makes it run.

Q. What research did you undertake to write this book? Were there any surprising or unexpected findings that you discovered during your research?

Ans. The two stories asked for very different kinds of homework. For Lia, the game side came from my own life: I have spent years as a designer of worlds and levels, so the way players talk, organise and fall out with one another was already in my head. Singapore is where I was born, which helped with everything else. Vienna took far more reading. I spent a long time on how watches were made by hand and on how bodies were studied in the late nineteenth century, because her parents' crafts shape the way she thinks. What surprised me was how much a watch movement and a body have in common once you start describing them in the same careful language, and that overlap became the way she sees the world.

Q. What was the biggest challenge you faced while writing this book? How did you overcome it?

Ans. Writing the second story at all. It was the one I could not begin until every other story existed, because so much of who she is only makes sense once you have met the women around her in the series. That meant holding her back for months while everything else was written, which was hard, because I always knew what was behind that door. In the end the waiting was the answer. When I finally sat down with her, every other story was finished and I knew exactly what she had to carry. She is a single lit room, much smaller than Lia's story, and she came quickly once I let her.

Q. How did you go about developing the characters in the book? Were any of them based on real people or events?

Ans. Lia was built around a split. The two halves of her have never been in the same room, and she likes it that way, because neither half has to carry everything. The men around her are what break that arrangement: Dmitri, Ren, Cesare and Elliot each come at her from a different side of her life, and she does not make it easy for any of them. Her story became the biggest thing I have ever written for one woman. None of the characters is based on a real person, though Lia's online world owes a lot to the years I have spent watching how people behave inside games.

Q. Can you share any interesting anecdotes or stories related to the writing of this book?

Ans. I finished Perpetura twice, six weeks apart. The first time was when the last story went live as an interactive novel in the browser, and that felt like opening a door, because anything I found later could be fixed the same afternoon. The second time was when Book Two came out, and it felt completely different. Once a book is out, whatever somebody downloads that day stays the version they have. I had not expected the second finish to feel like handing something over rather than putting something out, but it did, and it is still the moment I think about most.