The Ones Before

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

Ans. It started with a question I could not put down: what would happen if the same feeling arrived in completely different lives, hundreds of years apart? So I gave it to a court woman in Joseon Korea, a celebrated face in Belle Époque Paris and a blade for hire on the Tang Dynasty roads, and watched what each of them did with it. One meets it with composure, one behind a public face, one in her body before her mind gets a vote. Perpetura actually began as an interactive story in the browser, with every road through each woman's life left open. The book came later, once all of them were finished.

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

Ans. Each era had to earn its place, so the research was really about pressure: what each world would do to a woman with a feeling she cannot explain. In mid-Joseon court society, the wrong honorific could end a career and the phrasing of a letter carried as much weight as its contents. In Paris in 1893, being seen was a profession, with rivals, rules and a shelf life nobody mentioned. On the Tang roads, distance was counted in days of walking, and a stranger's posture told you more than their words. The surprise was Joseon. What looks stiff from the outside was a discipline people trained at every day, with real stakes for slipping, and that became the heart of Hyunjae.

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

Ans. Choosing what happened. In the interactive version, each woman's story branches into several roads, and I wrote every one of them as a full, finished life, including one where she chooses no one at all. A book reads front to back, so it can only hold one. For each woman I had to decide which version the book would say out loud, knowing the others were just as true and would not be in it. The way through was to stop looking for the best route and pick the one that let her question land hardest on the page. The other roads did not go anywhere. They simply stayed where they were.

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

Ans. I built each woman around the one thing she controls completely, then found the thing that would take it away. Hyunjae controls her composure, and her mother is arranging a marriage around her. Reine controls how Paris sees her, and she paints in private, work nobody is allowed to see. Liuyan controls her own body, and she has spent years being useful to people who never learn her name. None of them is based on a real person, but their worlds are as real as I could make them, and a lot of who they are came from asking what that century would demand of someone like her.

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

Ans. In a romance with more than one man in the room, every "he" is a small bet that the reader and I are tracking the same person. The stories are close and interior, so there are long stretches where nobody is named. I got nervous enough that I built a checker that looks at every pronoun and finds the nearest name. On the final story it raised thirty-six flags. Thirty-five were fine. One was real: a reader would have put the wrong man's hands into a scene. In a love story that is not a typo, it is the whole scene gone, so thirty-six alarms for one fire felt like a bargain.