I wanted to write an automaton story ever since college.  I studied the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann my freshman year and was super creeped out by his story “The Sandman,” which features a lifelike mechanical person.  In my sophomore year, when my professor took me on as a peer educator, she let me choose a story from the syllabus to facilitate the discussion with the freshman students.  I didn’t hesitate in choosing “The Sandman.” 

Fast forward, oh, a couple decades, and I have a clockpunk story with an automaton of my very own out in the world at last.  “Geartheart” is part of the new anthology Clocks from Little Key Press.  I also mixed in a desire to create a female mad scientist character, along with fond memories of the early scene in Disney’s Pinocchio where Jiminy Cricket encounters all the music boxes and clockworks in Geppetto’s workshop.  A lot of my stories and poems pay tribute to my dad’s side of the family, the Ecuadorian side; my mom is half German, though, so I was pleased to branch out, take inspiration from Hoffmann, and honor that side of my family this “time.”