Goodreads asked Paul McCormack:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Paul McCormack I was actually working on three separate short stories with thoughts of doing another short story collection to follow up "All the Lights That Have Shone". I liked them all, but they seemed to be covering a lot of the same themes and ideas and they all seemed very linear, which wasn't inspiring me. I was about (what I imagined) halfway through a story called "Hope's Ghost" and it got nuked.

I was deeply annoyed by losing the progress. After sulking a day or two I started to re-write it from memory. What I found was the other stories kept bleeding in to my memory of that story which got me wondering what would happen if those stories all happened in the same universe.

That idea evolved over time and eventually set the framework for what would become "This Languid Earth".

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