On the other hand, humans in relationships with machines tend to anthropomorphize them. And the greater the resemblance, the more intense the bond. So for humanoids I suspected that bond would be strong enough for your love to make your robot real, or at least real enough, sort of like in The Velveteen Rabbit. Because thinking of yourself as a robot is really just another identity framework: if you think you're a person, and everyone treats you like one, you'll probably at least act like one. You may have no evidence that you actually are a person like other people, but then again neither does anyone else. We're facing increasing evidence that selfawareness among organic humans is an illusion – so for me the idea of synthetic people pining away for a spark of humanity was a little dull. I wanted a story where Pinocchio slowly realized that becoming a real little boy wasn't so terribly special, after all.
How did you sell this book?
I was introduced to the editors of Angry Robot by the wonderfully sweet and talented Jetse de Vries, while at Montréal Worldcon. Jetse edited the Shine anthology, wherein my story "Ishin" is the closer. When he asked what I was working on, I told him I was at work on a novel about the dynastic feuds between self-replicating cannibalistic humanoids with a built-in kink for humans. "Are you ready to pitch your book?" he asked. "Well... I mean, I guess I–" "ARE YOU READY TO PITCH?" "SIR, YES SIR!" Whereupon he pulled out a chair for me, told the editors how much he had enjoyed my story, and we had a nice long chat while I nervously clutched a Moxyland plush.
It took me longer than expected to finish the book, but my agent Monica Pacheco was encouraging and so were my friends – many of whom are also in my workshop, the Cecil Street Irregulars. They read multiple drafts. I also showed partials to people on a writer's retreat to Gibraltar Point, on Lake Ontario. So I was really lucky to have some sharp, awardwinning sets of eyes on the book from the very beginning. I was also lucky to have the support of my husband at the time. He was one of the first people to really believe in the project and I remain humbly grateful for that. But even so, the book was rejected by a bunch of different publishers, and I still had to re-write the whole opening of the submission draft before the book became sale-able. David Nickle was invaluable for that – we watched A History of Violence together and suddenly everything clicked. Normally he gives me the end of all my stories, and this time he helped me see a new beginning. In short: it was an iterative process.