Many of my ideas begin as titles. Sometimes I sit with a notebook and jot down interesting titles, fun first lines, or very brief ideas. I don't try to create anything from these at that moment. I have to let them linger in my subconscious. Sometimes the idea will come back to me in the shower (my thinking space!) or during a movie (I'll spend half the film developing the idea in my head) or while driving (don't try and takes notes while at the wheel).

They Eat People on Phobos began as a different title, which I found funny: A Cannibal's Guide to Mars. What did that mean? I had no idea. But I started thinking about it over several weeks. Why would people resort to cannibalism? They'd have to be stranded, right? And the story grew from there. The first draft was bloated, had a lot of unnecessary back story, and delved too deeply into the marital strife between Stephen and Charlotte.

Once I saw how the subtext of the sexually strained relationship could work with the situation of the two being stranded without food, I understood how to rework the story (and title).

I'm a big comic-book fan. I'm less interested in who can run the fastest or punch the hardest. I like when the life of a character's alter-ego conflicts with their super ego. I don't think many superhero books do the "common" persona of their heroes justice. I took the typical red, white, and blue super-human and wondered what life would be like after retirement.

This could easily be the story of a celebrity getting too old to be in action movies or a boxer who's taken one blow too many and has to hang ‘em up. But I think putting such emotional weight on the shoulders of someone who could fly across the world in just a matter of minutes makes for a far more interesting story.

This started as a college poetry assignment. We were supposed to take a common saying or well-known phrase, turn it literal, and write a poem. I chose "I left my heart in San Francisco." The poem was terrible and had this poor man accidentally leaving his heart back at his hotel. Making it through airport security and getting on the plane, he suffered serious physical ailments. After all, he didn't have a heart.

Over the next decade that poem morphed into numerous story variations, finally settling on the one you can read in Even Swamp Creatures Get the Blues. I've always found it funny. And I like that its meaning is nebulous.

The TV show Lost meant a great deal to me. Its ending stuck with me. Okay, the ending made me depressed. I probably could have been clinically diagnosed. For a good week, I was sullen. My heart was broken. I had to get that feeling out in something.

I'd been looking for a good outerspace sci-fi story for a while. Rather than break the mold, I took an old idea – people trapped on a ship with something bad – but gave it my own twist. This bad thing, it never kills anyone directly. I hope the ending shows that evil doesn't have to be malevolent. Man's ability to venture into deep space can prove more beneficial than we might realize.

When you take a writing workshop, there is always going to be a wide range of skill levels. Usually, I'm open to this. Everyone has something to learn. But for some reason, one story about a blind date set something off in me. It was slow, boring, pedantic. The writer argued, "but this is what happened." Your job as a fiction writer is not to tell what happened, but to create entertaining stories that connect to some core part of humanity.

After class, I sat down determined to write an interesting version of an Internet blind date. The title came first and everything flowed quickly thereafter. I'd love to say that it's in second person for some very specific narrative benefit. It's not. I've rewritten it before in both first and third person and neither felt right. Something about second person works for me here (and only here).

Even Swamp Creatures Get the Blues was my first published story. Many thanks to Rosebud Magazine for launching my career.

Ravi's Funeral began as a story about identical twins. If you read the stories in Even Swamp Creatures Get the Blues, you'll probably notice that identity plays a big role. When this story was just about estranged twins who'd fought over a woman, it was bad melodrama. It stayed that waysfor many years.

The change from a story about twins to a story about a clone didn't come because I'd had a eureka moment and found a solution to a narrative problem. What I had originally couldn't be published. No one wanted it. No one liked it. It wasn't "literary" enough for small press mags and it wasn't part of any definable genre. When I began focusing my writing efforts on speculative fiction, I had to figure out a way to sci-fi things up.

I rewrote Ravi's Funeral from the perspective of the clone, at first just changing "twin" to clone before really investing and rewriting almost every line. What was once one of my weakest stories is now the strongest look at identity in this collection. Who is a clone once he's no longer following in the footsteps of his originator?

I'm a little tired of the romanticized versions of vampires. I don't think of them as some elitist class. They're outsiders in the world of the living. Most vampire fiction has the undead hiding themselves among humans as some form of predatory act. I wanted to tell a story of someone trying to hide his vampirism to avoid discrimination.

The story is intentionally simple, which freed me up to discover a lot of interesting facts about a world where vampires were second-class citizens. The details on how the Stake Squad tortures its detainees came as I wrote the first draft. They weren't initially a part of the story, but once I'd set up their cruelty, I had to tie them in to the ending. I like knowing where I'm headed with a story, but I give myself a lot of latitude to adjust elements as new opportunities reveal themselves.

The Coen Brothers released a short story collection in the ‘90s, Gates of Eden, which included an offbeat private detective tale. I wrote some little thing trying to imitate the Coens' gift for awkward situations. None of what I wrote survived future drafts except the name, Israel Stein. That first attempt was a weird vignette that had one of my favorite opening lines I've ever written: "I'm not your average Dick." I have no idea how I got from this dialogue to a time-travelling detective, but creativity works in very mysterious ways. Enjoy this snippet from the original draft:

I have about a dozen books on my shelf that retell the folklore of different cultures. I read through them once in a while, seeing if an old story can spark new ideas. The Baku caught my attention a while back. The Dream Eater. Though it looks hideous and sounds ominous, most cultures consider them benevolent. They eat bad dreams. A better story was to make one of them go rogue. A Baku with a taste for sweeter dreams.

Little changed from the first draft to the final. Published originally in Gargoyle Magazine, The Dream Eater was nominated for a 2010 Pushcart Prize.

Pay attention. Here is one of the great lessons of fiction. Surprise is never as good as suspense. Surprise means the unexpected happened. A man walked down the street and was shot in the head by a sniper. It's sudden. It's shocking. It's confusing. Suspense comes when the reader knows something a character does not. What's more tense: Having a knife-wielding maniac leap out and attack a woman in her own home or knowing that masked man is waiting in the bedroom while the woman goes about her daily routine without a clue?

Originally, Firsts was coy. Colleen hinted that she was different, that she was dangerous. But it wasn't really clear. And when the final moment came where she was forced to choose which rite of passage to take (that of teenage girl or werewolf), the reader was left befuddled as to what even happened. I thought I was clever, but no one got it. I started again, this time deciding to tell readers up front about Colleen's lineage. Firsts reads much clearer now. No, there's no surprises here – just great drama as a young girl accepts the pain of becoming an adult.

Stories about side characters draw me in. I like to learn about the people on the periphery, the ones who experience the main plot of a story from a very different perspective. What's it like being the gardener for a criminal mastermind? How challenging is it to be a physicist trying to reason how heroes and villains continually alter the time stream? If you pitch a no-hitter in the World Series the same day a superhero league saves the planet from an alien invasion, is it even worth celebrating?

I started asking myself what it would be like to be a janitor inside a super villain's base and the story for Monster Maker quickly took shape. It had to be a revenge tale (because I love revenge tales) and the villain had to have some depth. I tend to do more introspection than action, but I needed a physical struggle for the finale. The Monster Maker ends the only way it could.

Sometimes writing is nothing more than monkey see, monkey do. One of the great sci-fi writers of all time, Alfred Bester, wrote a short story with a fun take on the Devil as corporate honcho. It inspired me to try my own stab at the Devil. I wanted to accomplish two things. First, to show how the Devil tricks so many people into devaluing their souls. Second, to finally answer what the Devil does with the souls he collects.

On an email thread with a bunch of writers, someone proclaimed that nothing original could be done with old fairy tales. It was in response to a rash of fairy tale deconstructions, probably brought on by the success of Wicked. I disagreed. I'll always disagree when someone says an idea or a concept can't be fresh and original. Boil down any great book and you will see that there are only a handful of stories. There's plenty of ways to disguise them, add little twists, but we are fundamentally telling and receiving the same tales from the earliest days of oral storytelling.

I believe he'd used Snow White as an example. And I came back with a few quick notes on how you could make the story original. This person did more than concede. He said, "I'd read that story." And so I wrote it. Seven Sins for Seven Dwarves was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (which is a big deal for a geek like me).

Originally, this was a story titled Remission. The idea I had was to cure a vampire and then have him take a 12-step program, where he had to apologize to all his victims. The opening paragraph (above) is exactly as it first came off my fingertips. Immediately I knew this wasn't a story about a traditional vampire. Colin's the worst kind of empath. He feeds on the emotions of others.

I've always been keen on looking at the aftermath of big actions. What happens after the hero vanquishes his nemesis? What is life like once you've won the war? What happens after the bad guy's had his fill and gets bored? I think these types of questions can often be fascinating to explore.

This is the real reason Even Swamp Creatures Get the Blues is coming to an eBook reader near you. Novellas are tough to sell. Too big for most magazines, too short for most book publishers. I like this story. It's odd and sad and interesting. And for it to be seen by anyone, I needed to put it out on my own – so I packaged some other good reads around it.

I can't tell the origin of this story without spoiling the entire plot. I'll just say that this is a story about the power our own lies can have over us. It's about a search for identity.